Playing Rough: Malleable Tentacle Instruments for Participatory Performance

Tara Pattenden

Playing Rough: Malleable Tentacle Instruments for Participatory Performance
Image credit: Tara Pattenden
  • oral
  • Presence: in person
  • Duration: 13
  • Type: medium
  • Session: Togethering

Abstract:

This paper presents a retrospective longitudinal case study of a family of malleable textile NIMEs, developed and deployed over fifteen years in more than 110 public participatory performances and interactive installations. While prior research highlights the participatory potential of malleable NIMEs, longitudinal accounts of their sustained use in real-world settings outside research contexts remain scarce. As the maker-performer, I developed, crafted, and maintained these NIMEs in practice by sewing textile interfaces, building embedded electronics, writing code, and performing with them in public settings. This process generated an archive of maker notes, tour diaries, media documentation, and repair traces. Through analysis of this archive, I demonstrate how repeated public deployment outside the laboratory reshapes instruments for repeatable uptake, and show that interaction and mapping complexity are repeatedly reduced to enhance legibility in noisy, time-limited participatory contexts. I further argue that breakdown and repair traces can serve as longitudinal evaluation data, illustrated by contrasting an installation requiring daily repairs with a subsequent redevelopment that sustained approximately 85,000 guests with minimal intervention. The paper contributes a field-derived taxonomy of failures and issues, along with transferable construction and maintenance heuristics for designers of participatory textile NIMEs intended to withstand rough handling. It is also offered as a deliberate contribution to the NIME historical record, responding to calls for better documentation of instruments, long-term practice, and work outside peer-reviewed research contexts.