Chris Salter's Entangled is the most recent in what seems like a flood of monographs addressing some dimension of new media or technology in/and/as performance. In the period between 2005 and 2010 alone, Matthew Causey, Steve Dixon, Gabriella Giannachi, Christopher Baugh, Johannes Birringer, Susan Broadhurst, Susan Kozel, Sue-Ellen Case, and Rita Raley,Footnote ¹ among many others, published single-author books in this growing interdisciplinary field, which abuts theater and dance studies, visual and performance arts, performance studies, digital humanities, and philosophy. Salter explains in his introduction that performance “is becoming one of the major paradigms of the twenty-first century, not only in the arts but also in the sciences” (xxi). As such, performance has already begun to shape the discourses of science and technology in terms of “embodiment, situatedness, presence, and materiality” (xxi). We can therefore expect more scholarly work in this area, as performance becomes the measure of technological efficacy and the use of media and technology in performance becomes more and more mainstream.

Salter is a multimedia artist and assistant professor of design and computation arts at Concordia University. Although he situates Entangled in proximity to the field of performance studies,Footnote ² he differentiates his project from other authors in that and affiliated disciplines, avoiding arenas of inquiry such as online communities and video games that have become familiar components in analyses of digital performance (xxxiv). Because his is a technological history of performance rather than an explicitly “performative” analysis of technology, Salter narrows the scope of his project by defining performance conservatively, even as he opens up the term to a broad range of practices, including scenography, architecture, projected images, and robotics, in addition to the more traditional performing arts of theater, music, and dance: “Although the work here spans diverse areas […] the common thread that links such a polyphony of practices together is their physical, real-time situatedness involving collective co-present spectating, witnessing, and/or participation within the framework of a spatiotemporal event” (xxxiv). In this regard, Salter's work is not so different from the above-mentioned authors writing in the area of digital performance. What might set Salter's project apart is his desire to correct the “technical sloppiness” he finds in analyses of technology in performance (xxxvi). Unfortunately, Salter does not utilize his technical knowledge to advance new readings or interpretations. Indeed, he states from the outset that he is not interested in a hermeneutics of technology and that he focuses instead on “what [technology] does, how it does it, and what the repercussions are across the artistic practices that utilize it” (xxxv). In Salter's text, this Deleuzian maneuver reduces technology to its functionality—Salter speculates very little on what technology does to or for performance or to us as performers and spectators. He does, however, provide an astute historicization of technological performance in the long twentieth century, tracing a disciplinary genealogy in each chapter that includes both past (bordering on mythic) and contemporary artists, as well as failed attempts, unrealized projects, and forgotten technologies.

In laying out a horizontal history of technology in performance, proceeding chronologically through each of scenography, architecture, projection, etc., looping back in time to layer these histories atop one another with each successive chapter, Salter attends more to the artists of whom he speaks than the field of which he speaks. He subtly gestures toward ongoing debates in performance studies [i.e., “Does the performer gradually become dematerialized by the electronic fog of the increasingly realistic digital image […] or have the architectonics of the projected image sufficiently overwhelmed the human body so that the screen itself now becomes the new site and body of performance?” (164); “Was the screen simply a surface upon which to cast the results of infinitely complex processes that took place on a stage without actors […]?” (179)], but he refrains from entertaining the questions with which he prompts his readers.Footnote ³ In effect, Salter refuses to place his book in conversation with contemporary texts or to account for the many other authors who have tried to theoretically and philosophically reconcile what he suggests are always already entangled: “Human and technical beings and processes are so intimately bound up in a conglomeration of relations that it makes it difficult, if not impossible to tease out separate essences for each” (xxxii). Salter thus manages to dis-entangle himself from prominent arguments and scholars, which allows him to proceed without the theoretical-philosophical baggage other authors carry forward—not the least of which is the ontological opposition of the live and the mediated. It also means that Salter covers much of the same territory as the baggage-laden authors with whom he does not engage, rehearsing a familiar and at this point tiresome canon.

But because Salter's book is so far-reaching, even readers who consider themselves well versed in the area of technology and performance will come across historical figures with whom they are less familiar or projects (especially unrealized projects) of which they were unaware. Those who are not so familiar with this field will no doubt benefit from Salter's forays across arts practices in his articulation of a more holistic understanding of technology's role in performance. For most readers, Salter will surprise and delight as much as he disappoints—an inevitability given a survey that gives readers too little because it attempts so much.

This volume is most valuable for students of media and technology, for whom it seems to have been primarily written. These readers are introduced to the contributions of performance and its major artists, and to technological advancement, without getting embroiled in intradisciplinary arguments. For students of performance, who may well need to understand the scholarly debates of their field in addition to knowing its artists and practices, I recommend Steve Dixon's Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation as a more thorough and more disciplinary focused text. In contrast to Dixon's book, Salter's sometimes reads like an apologia for performance, foregrounding exemplary work and artists as a claim for inclusion in a media arts curriculum.Footnote ⁴

The space that Salter makes for himself on the periphery of performance and technology scholarship, accompanied by his central position in its practice, does allow for some perspectives that are especially useful for dance scholars. In particular, I find Salter's emphases on scenography and choreography—terms that recur throughout the text whether or not Salter is talking about set design or dance (and which therefore recall the usage of these terms by scholars of performance from Judith Butler to Susan Leigh FosterFootnote ⁵)—fruitful as twin concepts to think through technology's transformation of performance. While other scholars of media and technology have turned to technogenesis (the co-evolution of humans and technologies)Footnote ⁶ or the performativity of mediaFootnote ⁷ to found their own arguments of corporeal-technological or liveness-mediation hybrids, Salter offers scenography and choreography (in addition to the dramatic and sonic) as registers through which these entanglements make themselves known. Salter does not call attention to these notable terminological companions, which establish properties of performances, bodies, and technologies independent of lofty and untenable ontological claims. In a move that links him most strongly with the intellectual tradition of performance studies, Salter allows these performance-derived terms to inflect encounters that are not confined to the stage, solidifying their possibility as defining frames for multi- and interdisciplinary analyses of technology. By using such terms in his technological narrative of performance history, Salter allows performance to shed light on technology and to refract into other discourses in a way that remains relevant to scholars of dance, theater, music, and performance.