John Bowers and Lucy Suchman (Keynote)

Drawing from our early work on Improvising Machines (Bowers 2003) and Human-Machine Reconfigurations (Suchman 2007), this session will be a conversation on the transformative potentials of interfacing. We’ll think across questions of what improvisation is Other to, sociotechnical imaginaries of closed and open worlds, resistance (to closure, containment, cognitivism, and control), and what openness makes possible for collective practices of worlding. Along the way we’ll consider the irreducibility of lived practice, embodied and enacted; the displacement of reason from a position of supremacy to one among many ways of knowing in acting; the heterogeneous sociomateriality and real-time contingency of performance; and the new agencies and accountabilities effected through reconfiguring relations of human and machine. Throughout we will loop our discussion back to the contemporary situation of the sonic arts, particularly those that engage with improvisatory practices in the midst of unsettled interfacing.