NIME: A Mis-User's Manual

Sally Jane Norman; Paul Stapleton; John Bowers

NIME: A Mis-User's Manual
Image credit: Sally Jane Norman; Paul Stapleton; John Bowers

Abstract:

Ever since the initiating workshop at the 2001 ACM CHI’01 Conference, annual New Interfaces for Musical Expression conferences have seen a proliferation of work featuring different forms of music, research values, philosophical, ethical and political standpoints. The 2025 ‘Entangled’ theme celebrates this diversity of creative, technical, and social ‘intelligencings’ (Thrift [68, p153-154]). It is precisely the non- or pluri-paradigmatic character of NIME that is its strength. Drawing on Maria Lugones [41], we characterise NIME less as an entangled weave—where threads maintain their separate yet assembled and interconnected character—than as a ‘curdling’ where relationships are more complex, varied, mutually interrupting and shaping, indeterminate and unknown without careful dialogue. We do not consider it appropriate to offer unifying frameworks or mappings with often hidden authoritarian implications. Rather, following Rancière [5], we prefer a radically democratic dissensus and, following Lugones, a spirit of ‘festive resistance’ where we poke at the limits of our inherited metaphors to undermine attempts to provide a fixed orderliness, (re)framing topics to kickstart exchange on new fertile grounds for collaboration. Multiple kinds and collisions of agency, and the lively openness of what some might deem ‘failure’ are prioritised over the often inhibiting closure and certainty of ‘success’ [e.g. 10, 11, 12, 40]. Our topics include: multiple ways of making as a means of maximising exposure to possible failure; shifting from interfaces to interfacing to create arenas for action rather than tools for purposes; foregrounding risk, inefficiency and forgetting; formulating improvisation as knowing-when and composing-the-now; performance practice, settings and contingencies; alternative resourcings/reframings for research; a wild spirit of tactical oppositionalism, dynamic uncompromise, and existential pluralism, to embrace the independence of divergent voices.