Visual Music Archive

close Portfolio

 

Chris Salter 

(*1967) is a media artist, performance director and composer/sound designer based in Montreal, Canada and Berlin, Germany.


Christopher Salter is a media artist, performance director and composer/sound designer based in Montreal, Canada and Berlin, Germany.

His artistic and research interests revolve around the development and production of real time, computationally-augmented responsive performance environments fusing space, sound, image, architectural material and sensor-based technologies. Such projects range from large scale, public driven installations where the line between spectators and performers is blurred and questioned to traditional performance environments with trained performers that are augmented with computational and media systems.

His current research interests include the use of wireless sensor networks and ubiquitous computing technologies in artistic contexts, cross modal perception, enactive interactive systems, real time audio and critical studies of media, technology and performativity.
Salter studied economics and philosophy at Emory University and received his Ph.D. in the areas of theater and computer-generated sound at Stanford University where he worked with former Brecht assistant Carl Weber as well as pioneers of digital synthesis John Chowning, Max Matthews and Chris Chafe at the Center for Research in Computer Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He was awarded the Fulbright and Alexander von Humboldt Chancellor grants for research/work in Germany from 1993-1995.

After collaborating with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe/ Ballett Frankfurt, he co-founded the art and research organization Sponge, whose works have stretched between the arenas of performance, installation, scientific research and publications and have toured internationally to festivals, exhibitions and venues. His work with Sponge as well as solo projects has been seen in such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice), Ars Electronica (Linz), Villette Numerique (Paris), Transmediale (Berlin), EXIT Festival (Maison des Arts, Creteil-Paris), Place des Arts (Montreal), Elektra (Montreal), Shanghai Dance Festival (Shanghai), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), the Banff Center (Banff), Dance Theater Workshop (New York), V2 (Rotterdam), SIGGRAPH 2001 (New Orleans), Mediaterra (Athens) and the Exploratorium (San Francisco), among others.

Salter’s projects have been written about most recently in the New York Times, ID Magazine and Leonardo magazine and received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Daniel Langlois Foundation, the Creative Work Fund/San Francisco, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FQRSC and the LEF Foundation, among others. He has given invited talks at such venues as the Banff Center for the Arts, Ars Electronica, Deutsches Architektur Museum, Zurich University of the Arts, HKW Berlin, ZKM, Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU, HfK Zurich, Queens College/CUNY, Deutsches Architektur Museum, Brown University, Stanford University, Goldsmiths College, Elektra festival, Amherst College, the Rhode Island School of Design, Transmediale, HfG Karlsruhe, Concordia University, Subtle Technologies-Toronto, SLS-Paris, NIME 03-Montreal, UdK-Berlin and e-Culture, Amsterdam, among many others. He has sat on numerous juries including NIME, ISEA and the Prix Ars Electronica.

Salter has published in the areas of technology and performance, real time responsive environments, mobile real time media and cultural politics. He is the author of the forthcoming book Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance to published by MIT Press in 2010. He has been visiting professor in music, graduate studies and digital media at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada where he teaches in the areas of real time digital audio, immersive environments, critical theories of media and performance and technology.

 

Source: Chris Salter

 

 

Chris Salter, real time, dance

Reading

Digital Harmony (1980): On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art – John Whitney, Sr. wanted to create a dialog between "the voices of light and tone." All of his early experiments in film and the development of sound techniques lead toward this end. He felt that music was an integral part of the visual experience; the combination had a long history in man's primitive development and was part of the essence of life. His theories On the complementarity of Music and Visual Art were explained in his book, Digital Harmony, published by McGraw-Hill in 1980. (Paradise 2012)

Computer Music Journal: Visual Music (2005) - The articles in this issue are all devoted to the topic of Visual Music: audiovisual creations in which the artist strives to endow the video component with formal and abstract qualities that mimic those of musical composition. (Computer Music Journal)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

the concept of … (here and now) (2010) by Klaus Obermaier consists of seven chapters that reflect and investigate multiple simultaneous perspectives and the resulting ambiguity. The transmission of body-time into computer-time and its retransfer into the physical space as visual and acoustic components of the digital environment, as well as the superimposition of different variable structures and timings, all this unveils the tension between reality and representation, between live performance and its digital depiction and transformation. And since all content is created in real-time by the performers, it shows us the fascination but also the limitations of our existence in the inescapable here and now. (Klaus Obermaier)

Robin Fox is an artist straddling the often artificial divide between audible and visible arts. As an audio-visual performance artist his work has featured in festivals worldwide. Recent appearances include a commissioned performance for the Henie Onstad Kunstcenter, Oslo, Mois Multi Festival, Quebec City, Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz, Musica Genera Festival, Warsaw and the Yokohama Triennale. (Robin Fox)

White Noise (2010) is a ballett work by Amy Seiwert (choreography) and her company im'ij-re (that's how you pronounce the word imagery). Interactive system design by Frieder Weiss. im'ij-re is a contemporary ballet company in San Francisco directed by Amy Seiwert. Holding the belief that ballet has an expressive and vital voice relevant for our current time, respect is held for swans and sylphs, but they are not where the company’s interests lie. Having no desire to regurgitate art,  im'ij-re’s artists share the belief that through collaboration and experimentation with artists of other discplines, vibrant and courageous ideas can be expressed. Habitual reactions are discouraged. (Frieder Weiss)

Mortal Engine (2008) produced by well known australian dance company Chunky Move. Director: Gideon, Interactive System Designer: Frieder Weiss, Laser performance: Robin Fox, Composer: Ben Frost. Mortal Engine is a intermedia dance performance using movement and sound responsive projections to portray an ever-shifting, shimmering world in which the limits of the human body are an illusion. (Chunky Move)

Apparition (2004) is an interactive dance and media performance conceived and directed by Klaus Obermaier, in collaboration with the Ars Electronica Futurelab, featuring Desirée Kongerød and Rob Tannion. Appariation is a unique dance and media work that fully confronts the aesthetic potential and consequences of integrating interactive technologies with live performance on the stage. Working closely with Obermaier is an international team including London-based dance artists Robert Tannion and Desireé Kongerød and interaction designers and programmers Christopher Lindinger and Peter Brandl (from the Ars Electronica Futurelab). Development of the system for motion tracking and analysis was provided by Hirokazu Kato from Japan. (Klaus Obermaier)