First-person and second-person perspectives for ML in NIME

A workshop at NIME 2024

🚨Update (27/08): If you are registered at NIME and want to attend this workshop you can register here. There is no need to do a submission to attend this workshop. This workshop will happen in a hybrid format so participants are welcome to join remotely. We will email you the zoom link to the email you provided in the form. Lunch will be provided for in-person attendees.🚨

This workshop aims to consolidate ongoing critical discussions on machine learning and artificial intelligence practices within the NIME community. In particular, rather than focusing on technical or theoretical discussions, we foreground first- and second- person methods to articulate insights and experiences that are otherwise often overlooked on the prevailing discourses surrounding such practices.

The NIME community typically repurposes emergent technologies for creative uses, ML being one that has received significant attention, especially for building gesture-based interactive systems. Recent developments in deep learning have widened the creative possibilities of ML and diversified its uses within the NIME community. Furthermore, these tools have become an important research interest for NIME, with numerous technical contributions in the form of datasets, models, live performance software and deployment pipelines, for diverse applications such as sound synthesis or sequence generation. These advancements have enabled the exploration of new forms of embodied interaction and performance possibilities of such technologies. However, contributions using participatory or ethnographic methods for the design of ML systems or examining the artists’ practices with such technologies are less frequent. Beyond technicalities, how practitioners build, appropriate and relate to such technologies is sparsely discussed.

This workshop aims to consolidate ongoing critical discussions on machine learning and artificial intelligence practices within the NIME community. Similarly to the NIME 2021 workshop “Critical Perspectives on AI/ML in Musical Interfaces”, rather than focusing on technical implementations, this workshop acknowledges the diverse social and cultural impact of such technologies. Specifically, in this workshop, we intend to focus on first- and second-person methods in order to share and describe personal experiences and practices as artists and/or researchers. Another previous workshop, “Querying experience for NIME”, held at NIME 2023, presented some first- and second-person methods in the context of NIME: someaesthetics, microphenomenology, dialogic design and retrospective trioethnography. Such methods enable researchers to articulate experiences of the design practice from within, and to expose perspectives which are typically overlooked on design narratives, and particularly on the discourses surrounding ML and AI. Indeed, it is rarely described how artists/musicians/performers/researchers who have seized these technologies have developed an idiosyncratic and sometimes long-term practice. We believe that giving the opportunity for artists/musicians/performers/researchers to give their own perspective about their practice with ML and AI is also a way of potentially bringing out new critical discussions, interaction strategies or design implications.

Interested participants are asked to submit a short position paper / pictorial / video (1/2 to a page, 30 seconds to a minute) – details and instructions for submission are available in the call for contributions section. The workshop will be a half-day in duration, starting with two 20-minutes opening talks from the third and fourth authors, followed by collective exercises and brief talks and demos grouped in sessions by topic. After each session, all participants will be invited for a joint discussion.