Barad, 2007 · via Thinking with Sound (CHI ‘24)
What it says
There is no person on one side and a system on the other, meeting in the middle. The two are constituted in the encounter — what counts as the human and what counts as the instrument is an outcome of the interaction, not its starting condition. The experience is not located in either party. It is in the in-between.
Does it hold for my work
It is available if I need to argue that my installation is not a tool the audience operates but a partner they perform with. That is an argument I might want. Under v4, where meaning is supposed to be built between strangers, the vocabulary of the in-between is suddenly closer to the question than it was a month ago.
Why it stays conditional
It is a heavy, ontological theory, and I would be importing the whole apparatus to license one sentence. It also comes with diffractive analysis attached as its method, and I do not intend to use that method.
There is a lighter route to the same claim: Ciciliani’s system of enunciation says the work is the whole arrangement speaking — author, performer, audience, hardware, relations — and it says it in a vocabulary that a design audience will accept without an ontology lecture.
The test
If I can make the argument with Ciciliani, I do not need Barad. I should try Ciciliani first.