Making the Immaterial Material: A Diffractive Approach Toward a Politics of Material Culture Within NIME

Brittney Allen; Andrew Mcpherson; Alexandria Smith; Jason Freeman

Making the Immaterial Material: A Diffractive Approach Toward a Politics of Material Culture Within NIME

Abstract:

Traditional Human-Computer Interaction has often been critiqued for its ostensibly opaque position on ethical, ontological, and epistemological concerns, particularly in relation to completed design artifacts. More recently, similar criticisms have been directed at the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) community for its relative silence on contemporary political issues. However, it is possible that an implicit ethics of material culture is already embedded within NIME discourse — one that could be critically examined and potentially mobilized as a foundation for a more explicitly political ethics. Inspired by feminist discourse, namely Karen Barad's theory of agential realism, and contextualized through Bruno Latour's remarks regarding the ethics of design, this paper explores the possibilities of entanglement in DMI design. We begin with a discussion of diffraction and entanglement followed by a brief overview of values-oriented and "world-building" theoretical models and methodologies of design research. We continue with our generative "DMI-as-apparatus" approach to diffractive methodology and conclude with a case study BRAIDS_, a digital music instrument based upon the black American cultural practice of hair braiding, that examines critical design decisions that are otherwise deemed invisible by traditional methods of scientific inquiry.