Hi, my name is Sarah Sithi-Amnuai. I'm a performer composer and creative technologist based in Los Angeles.
Today, I'm going to discuss the background behind my paper exploring identity through design, before introducing my midi glove interface, Nami.
Prior to World War II there are over 43 Japan towns across America and most primarily on the West Coast
Sadly, this number has now declined to 4,
all of which are located in California.
A major contributor to that decline was World War II,
the Japanese-american internment camps, and gentrification, which drove social pressure on Japanese communities to embrace America
and distance themselves from Japanese culture over the following decades.
Nikkei is a general term to refer to mixed Japanese people
whether it's Japanese American, Japanese Brazilians,
or another mix. Other terms like Issai
Nesei, Sansei or Yonsei refer more specifically to 1st
2nd 3rd or 4th generations of Japanese people.
More recent generations of Nikkei people like myself have struggled to find a strong sense of cultural identity
We don't feel entirely American nor Japanese but have been gradually establishing our Nikkei culture and music
through community-led initiatives like sustainable Little Tokyo, an organization that develops and promotes Nikkei culture in Little Tokyo,
a Japan town in downtown Los Angeles.
I've been involved with various Little Tokyo based organizations since 2018,
Using my glove Nami to perform with other Nikkei artists at events like last year's Festival of Shadows
There's no traditional sound or instrumentation in Nikkei music. Nikkei people like myself
grew up in America listening mostly to American music but have had some degree of exposure to traditional Japanese music and values.
Despite what might be perceived as a decaying cultural foundation
I found the absence of precedent for instrumentation and aesthetic very freeing as a performer.
Since there are no prescribed instruments in the Nikkei group. I found fellow performers to be very open
I'm working with my own invented instrument, Nami.
When I first started working on Nami I was only really thinking about using it in the context of my own trumpet performance
I was primarily interested in developing a tool that would help me augment extended trumpet techniques with electronic effects
and I suspect that these kinds of selfish motivations also underpin the invention of many other new interfaces for musical
expression. However, one of my mentors at the time Christine Minders
challenged me to think
beyond building for myself and for building for other communities,
especially unheard or marginalized ones.
I thought about the many musical instruments that have proliferated throughout history are those that have successfully crossed cultural boundaries.
This leads to the question:
How can I make my instrument relevant to other communities to give it a better chance at a longer life?
This is an important question that I now realize deserves consideration in the development of any new musical interface and
the answers to this do not come easily. How can I make my MIDI glove useful to others?
Meinders introduced me to what
she called the cultural AI design tool, which she authored in order to help provide a structured approach to finding these answers
Meinders created Feminist AI a community research and design group to create a product design philosophy that privileges
social and cultural considerations in response to hegemonic AI.
The tool provides a design framework that flexibly accommodates people of different backgrounds and technical proficiencies.
The cultural AI design tool is composed of five phases
Sketching
Concept phase
Critical Thinking
Reflections
Implementations
Sketching
Concept, Reflections, and Implementation may look familiar to you as the basis of many design tools,
but what's most interesting is the way that critical thinking through cultural lenses can encourage a variety of insightful questions and its
responses and other phases.
During the first sketching phase, the designer is essentially setting up a macro blueprint determining a preliminary input,
functionality and material or form. If you can describe your project,
describe what you want to do whether it's creating,
exploring, finding patterns,
predicting or any number of actions and describe who this is for these are important to answer in the sketching phase
You'll be setting yourself up to align intention with impact. For Nami
this was the phase in which I originally established
I had wanted to explore non-traditional hand gestures outside of what was typically used for trumpet players in their left hand.
The left hand is typically the hand controlling mutes, which was challenging for me as a short armed person,
so I wanted to explore options outside of that.
During this concept phase,
the designer begins to pick apart some of these macro parts by determining training data, the
machine learning model and the material or form.
The underlying questions during this phase include:
Who created the rules, who created the data, and how will you implement this idea: Are using existing software? If so, which?
At this point Nami would be using my hand gestures as training data through machine learning software like Wekinator,
but I realized that when other community members use Nami they expose me to
alternative gestures, and by making changes to my design to accommodate these movements Nami became more
translatable and relevant to other communities.
The next step is the critical thinking phase, in which the designer determines a cultural blueprint by refining the purpose,
intentions and material inform by looking at these aspects through various cultural lenses.
This is when the cultural body is most present in the design process.
What sort of ideologies demanded its creation; who does this benefit or privilege is?
It inclusive or exclusive?
Does it require a specific skill set?
What will it be used for during this time? And what cultural body is it exploring or extending?
For this space Nami was originally framed for me as a trumpet player,
but in this phase I realized my own cultural body as a Nikkei musician would be much more fruitful and compelling to explore and
this could lead to more collaboration with people outside of the trumpet or music spaces.
The next phase is the reflection phase which is when you determine if you would change any input,
functionality, material or form based on everything up till this point. This might mean refining the target gesture to focus on a specific
community's gesture, or designing several gloves each designed to fit a certain type of hand.
I ended up pursuing both of these options and have created a couple of different gloves for different hand sizes. Now I have begun analyzing
gestural vocabulary of various communities I'm part of.
The final phase is the implementation phase in which the blueprints the designer has created or acted upon through the marriage between input,
software model and final material and forms.
By no mean does it mean that the instrument tool or product is complete at this point. Rather one
iteration has been created and the designer is encouraged to go back to preceding steps and iterate further after testing it out.
This is when you'll see if your intentions align with the impact.
Some other questions the designer can think about are where does it live? What are the cultural and social
implications of bringing this into the world right now?
Are there are things that could go wrong?
Where will it end up once you finish with it?
Iterating with a cultural AI design tool has complemented my compositional process as well,
and has helped me determine how my tech can support an artistic vision for performance.
One such example is my collaboration with choreographers for the Festival of Shadows, an
intergenerational performance Little Tokyo Los Angeles in which Bhutto and Somatic movement ideology became the
underpinning for choices and gestural vocabulary, sounds and materials.
While there have been multiple iterations of Nami for myself,
I've also started building gestural controllers for other individuals and communities and I'm preparing to have future electro-acoustic
performances include multiple glove users
considering their respective cultural bodies.
By making it relevant to other communities,
my hope is that Nami embodies these diverse cultural influences and has a better chance at a longer life.
If you'd like to know more about the cultural AI design tool or Nami,
please check out my paper exploring identity through design, a focus on the cultural body via Nami and if you'd like to reach me
Please feel free to email me at sarasithiamnuai@gmail.com
Thanks for listening