Speculative ubimus design: Probing the potential for expansion of second-wave ubiquitous music frameworks

Abstract

This contribution engages with the relationships between field deployments and conceptual underpinnings of ubiquitous music (ubimus) research, to establish a dialog with speculative design. Three cases serve as triggers for a conceptual exercise that points to common threads among ubimus endeavors within three active areas of second-wave ubimus investigations: Emugel, a tool for lite-coding; Ouija, an ecomprovisational artwork; and InMesh, a multimodal installation inspired in the cultural frictions of current Amazonian reality. Lite coding is proposed as a sonic-oriented practice that incorporates simplified semantic strategies to foster knowledge sharing in iterative individual and group-based creative activities. Ouija is an ecomprovisational artwork deployable on the musical internet that highlights the dynamic relationships between fixed and volatile resources in music making. The processes leading to the realization of InMesh furnish an opportunity to probe the limits of repurposed telematic tools for sharing implicit knowledge and hint at potential limitations of multimodal artistic frameworks.