[ISEA2010] Artist Statement: Christopher Salter – Just Noticeable Difference

Artist Statement

Interactive installation 2010

An installation by Christopher Salter in collaboration with Marije Baalman and Harry Smoak.  Just Noticeable Difference is intended for an individual experience and can only be accessed by one person at a time.

Just Noticeable Difference is a sensory environment for one person at a time in which total darkness is accompanied by extraordinary small variations of sense stimuli. Barely detectable body motions are sensed and affect the patterns and intensity of a composition of touch, light and sound. The installation explores the fluctuation between noise and order, sensation and sense making directly at the level of bodily perception.

  • Christopher Salter (CA) is an artist, Associate Professor for Computation Arts at Concordia University and researcher at the Hexagram Institute in Montreal. He collaborated with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe before co-founding the collective Sponge, whose works stretched between artistic production, theoretical reflection and scientific research. Salter’s performances, installations, research and publications have been presented at numerous festivals and conferences around the world. Recently he published the book Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press, 2010).
  • Marije Baalman (NL) studied Applied Physics at the Technical University in Delft, Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and completed her PhD on Wave Field Synthesis and electro-acoustic music in 2007 at the Technical University of Berlin. Her research focuses on the use of wireless networks for live performance and installations.
  • Harry Smoak (CA) is a media researcher and producer based in Montreal, Canada. He is presently a doctoral candidate in Fine Arts, at Concordia University where he is also an adjunct faculty in the Department of Design and Computation Arts. His current research interests lie in phenomenology of lighting, networked sensor technologies, urban media ecologies, and technologies of performance.

Full Text with images (PDF) p. 90-93