M. Dixon

Echo's body: play and representation in interactive music software

This paper reflects on Hans Georg Gadamers theory of play and adapts it to the context of interactive music software. I aim to show that interactive technological environments afford play in ways which, because they relate to truth and selfhood, are cognitively and philosophically significant and are not ‘merely’ playful.

Writing as Life Performed

An anonymous and originless slice of popular wisdom counsels that life is not a rehearsal.1 If this slogan is to have any salutary effects upon those who have been so admonished, what concept of “rehearsal” is being referenced? And what presumptions about the nature of “life” today are thereby advanced? The fable of Groundhog Day notwithstanding, by this phrase we are given to understand that in life we have no second chances; we cannot prepare, shape, schedule and perfect life’s events in advance of their actual occurrence.2 What happens to us really happens; and the actions we take, our decisions and interventions, have genuine, concrete consequences. So, the implication is that we had better get life right.