“How do we strengthen humans in social relationships through the use of technologies rather than isolating them more and more? My work is very critical about the screen. It is against screen-based experience, against this kind of solitary, solipsistic individuals, sitting in their cubical, looking at the screen and receiving the world through the screen. The world is not experienced based on visible information only. It’s based on an acoustic, tactile, sensory and even ontological sense of being, and how being is constructed.”The media artist and composer Chris Salter (Berlin) develops and produces, often in cooperation with other artists and technicians, multi-media environments, which merge space, vsion and sound. These environments react on their visitors and vice versa. Visitors of his environment „TGarden“ for example are invited to put on specially designed clothes, made from plastic or metal. These costumes carry velocity sensors, which measure the speed of gestures, the turn of the body, the movement of the legs etc. Through a wireless transmission system, these data are distributed into a computer network, which is situated outside the scenario. There, the data triggers the generation of sounds in real-time.

Chris Salter’s multi-media environments can be called „interactive“. He himself prefers the term „responsive“. Especially on the level of hearing, his works respond in complex and subtle ways to the audience’s presence and activities. His environments transfer their visitors into an audio-visual scenario with strong audible as well as with dramatic elements. At the „transmediale 04“ in Berlin Salter was present with his work „Schwelle“.

Sabine Breitsameter:

Chris, to describe your artistic approach by the term “spatial” does not really point to the essence of your work. I think, the key word for describing it appropriately is “immersive”, which means, that it is enveloping its visitors completely, creating a kind of environment. What is your concept of immersion?

Chris Salter:

Immersion is a complex idea and there’s a lot of different ways of discussing it. The first principle of immersion is that there’s a body involved. Not body as an abstract concept, but a body in the sense of embodiment, of experiencing something, experiencing the world experiencing it certainly musically, through sound and multiple senses, multi-modal I would say, not just by ears, but through touch and things like that.

Sabine Breitsameter:

Why is the sonic aspect so important to you?

Chris Salter:

The sonic aspect is very important to me, because it is a sense which is dynamic. The vision works as a frontal sense as well as a peripheral sense, but I can never see behind me. Whereas sonically, I am always surrounded, particularly, if I am aware how sound reacts in an environment, reacts with the architecture of a space. I am constantly surrounded by a sound in that sense. And that’s one of the senses immersion comes from. One is wrapped in it. It stimulates us from all sides and all angles.

Sabine Breitsameter:

Immersion is a concept with a long history. What is its specific idea in the digital age?

Chris Salter:

I was just thinking back to the concept of whispering rooms, where you have sound that is transmitted based in the architecture of the space at very, very low levels of amplitudes. Those are very immersive spaces, and if you are going maybe to the cathedrals in Europe, you are already in acoustic environments, that are far more immersive than any kind of environment today, that is constructed by the computer. So, I don’t want to say, that my work is new, that my work is different. Certainly the technology is different, and what the technology now gives us is the ability – if you talk about the computational technology – to actually control in a far more rigorous way the degree of the manipulation of media in an environment, the manipulation of the acoustics of a space: whether it’s the example of the IRCAM tool, by which you can change the physical sound qualities of an environment by changing the acoustic panels, or whether its taking the input of the environment and being able to output it in some mediated way.

So, my work very much plays on that, but it also is using technologies, which were before not there. So the ability e.g. in a project like TGarden for a normal person to be able to move in an environment and actually move in time through sound, or be able to actually synthesize sound on the fly individually, is something, which didn’t exist up to ten years ago, because we didn’t have wireless technology.

Sabine Breitsameter:

Well, technology is crucial for your work. In which way are you questioning it and how are you trying to go beyond it?

Chris Salter:

How can we imagine these technologies actually go back to the question of human-human interaction? How do we strengthen humans in social relationships through the use of technologies rather than isolating us more and more? – This is a big question about e.g. screen-based experience. And my work is very, very critical about the screen. It is against screen-based experience, against this kind of solitary, solipsistic individuals, sitting in their cubical, looking at the screen and receiving the world through the screen. The world is not received through the screen. The world is not received, based on a kind of visible information. It’s based on this tactile, sensory and even ontological sense of being, and how being is constructed.

So, by focusing very particularly on physical environments, my work is a critique against this kind of virtuality, that people call it: virtual space or virtual reality. First of all, virtual reality is also a concept from twenty, thirty years ago. You can even see it in the 1930s. It’s mentioned in Antonin Artaud’s work, because he’s talking about the theatre as a “double”, which is a present and absent thing. But that’s very much where the technology brings us to. So, with computational technology, the dissolution of the body has been very much in play in the last few years. But my concept is very much going against that.

People’s social relations to each other have to continue to go back to the sense of being physically present with one another. And my projects very much have to do with this physical presence of encountering other people, of seeing what other people do, of looking at how other people perform.

Sabine Breitsameter:

The question is: What will become of the autonomous sound and the conscious attitude of listening in such interactive or responsive multimedia settings?

Chris Salter:

What is interesting to me is this question of social listening. That is, where actually music and sound play a very big role in these environments. Because we are talking about spaces, where people are socially present. And you can go back to the concert hall, you can also go back to sitting and watching Javanes shadow puppet theatre accompanied by Gamelan, where you are very much engaged in a social listening experience. That’s very, very different to sitting with a headphone on, with a walkman, and listening to a CD, or playing from your computer or from your stereo, which is becoming less the case. Music and sound in my responsive environments play a very big role in terms of social gathering, so things are not listened to in isolation. There is a kind of communal listening. The presence of the live-viewer or the live-participant creates this social environment, engaging in listening as a communal activity. So, the reason for creating spaces, where sound has a predominant dimension, is to explore the question: What does of communal listening become, when people actually change the sonic environments, based on their behaviour.

Sabine Breitsameter:

One of the main critical arguments in the debate about interactive environments is, that if someone wants to experience it one has to enter it, one has to become a part of it. It’s impossible to watch it from outside, from a critical distance.

Chris Salter:

I would say, that all of my projects very much play on this kind of oscillation between…. let´s make it simple: The poles in the 20th century are Artaud and Brecht: Brecht representing the critical in the sense of that the stage or the environment is a place of social display and of being critical of the social mechanisms, and Artaud with his position of the one being subsumed or being overwhelmed by an experience. And, I find that oscillation or that play between the two interesting. So, I would say that the ability to be immersed and then to step outside of the immersion is one of the aims of my work.

Sabine Breitsameter:

Thank you, Chris!

Biography

Chris Salter, *1967, grew up in the US, lives in Berlin, studied economics and philosophy and completed a Ph.D. in the areas of theater and computer-generated sound at Stanford University. He has collaborated with, among others, Peter Sellars, and William Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt. He co-founded the art+research organization Sponge, whose works stretch between the areas of performance, installation, scientific research and publications and have been shown at Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH 2000, Mediaterra-Athens, the Paris festival „Villette Numerique“ and the Banff Center a.o. Salter is currently a guest professor at Rhode Island School of Design and was, in 2003, Artist in Residence at the Podewil/Berlin.

Publications (selection)

• “The Kulturstaat in the Times of Empire,” Performing Arts Journal 2004.
• “TGarden: Wearable Instruments and Augmented Physicality,” with Joel Ryan. Conference on New Interfaces in Musical Expression (NIME), Montreal 2003.
• “Chronopolis: Inhabiting Time”, with Erik Adigard. Loudpaper, 2003.
• “The Architecture of Listening,” “Crossfade: Sound Travels on the Web,” online media project, SFMOMA, Walker Arts Center, Goethe Forum/Munich, ZKM. May 2000. http://www.sfmoma.org/crossfade.
• “Sponge: The Surface that Holds the Image is Unstable,” éc/ArtS: #2[00_01], Fall 2000, Spécial: Textualités & Nouvelles Technologies.