Turner · via Lüneburg / GAPPP (2018)
What it says
Engagement with a performance system is easier for people who already have embodied familiarity with the instrument involved. That knowledge is tacit — not stated, not taught in the moment, carried in the hands. Lüneburg finds it as a condition of engagement rather than a nice extra.
What happened when I used it
This is the theoretical basis for the controller as a cultural symbol, and it is the single most useful thing I took from GAPPP.
In their setting, tacit knowledge is a limitation: engagement depends on the audience being trained musicians, so the work reaches concert halls and nobody else. My move is to invert it. A gamepad is an instrument millions of people already have tacit knowledge of. Knowing what a controller is for is not a barrier to be designed around — it is a competence already distributed through the audience, for free.
That inversion is close to being my actual contribution, and it is why I keep coming back to this concept.
The counter-argument I have to answer
If familiarity ends exploration, then arriving with tacit knowledge might cap the experience rather than open it. And tacit knowledge is unevenly distributed — an audience that has never held a controller experiences a different piece.
Under v4 that unevenness becomes an asset rather than a problem: among strangers, one person knowing what to do and another not is a relation, and relations are what v4 is about.