"Could we call this new style 'Interactive Music'?"
"In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that 'interactive' anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is 'unfinished.' Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a 'nature,' and that this nature is fixed and describable. We find more and more that this idea is insupportable - the 'nature' of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it, and what you want it for. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else. Now a lot of cultures far more 'primitive' than ours take this entirely for granted - surely it is the whole basis of animism that the universe is a living, changing, changeable place."
- "Gossip is Philosophy" (interview with Brian Eno), Wired Magazine, May 1995
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