Play Make Believe: Exploring Design Fiction and Absurd Making for Critical NIME Design

While making musical interfaces, NIME practitioners draw influence from many diverse disciplines, skills and aesthetic perspectives. New musical artefacts and interactions are shaped by cultural values as much as research concerns and methods. The NIME community embraces a broad range of''ways of knowing'', and researchers are often engaged with an inclusive and critical discussion of technology. We propose a workshop based on hands-on making of unconventional artefacts to advance the debate around the complex and versatile nature of contemporary musical instruments. Our proposal exploits design fiction and absurd making to engage with critical NIME discourses and practices. We aim to question the role of technology in creative practice through make-believe, fragile and contradictory artefacts and playful design explorations.

• http://instrumentslab.org/data/giacomo/N...