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This issue of ECHO confronts a turning point: the moment in which the interface ceases to be an apparently silent conduit between human and machine and instead becomes a medium of friction, transformation, and play. The ubiquitous "blinking cursor"—emblematic of both the command-line past and the chat-based present—belies a deeper continuity: that our interactivity with computation is increasingly constrained by linearity, by transcriptionism, by the illusion of seamlessness.
But what if artistic practice, and especially musical instrumentality, offer a countermove? As Poliks and Trillo argue in their foundational article, Interface After AI, we must begin to dismantle the ontological scaffolding that holds the "interface" in place to experience it not as a gateway, but rather as a generative regime—one with its own politics, agencies, and failures. What if we refuse the servo-mechanical transcriptive loop of input/output?
Across the contributions to this issue, we encounter this interface anew: as haunted, enchanted, embodied, decolonised, collaborative, queer, ludic, glitchy, material, and speculative. The approaches enclosed do not always land squarely in the musical domain—but they resonate with its core concerns: performativity, liveness, friction, transduction, timbre, feedback, loop. If ECHO insists on music as a privileged site for probing the politics and poetics of technology, it is because musical practice knows something normative interface design keeps trying to forget: that control is an illusion, that expression leaks, and that every instrument encodes a politics of interaction that exposes the fiction of neutrality.
Jesse Benjamin’s Loss Moves proposes an alternative model of AI musical interaction, turning from predictive exactitude to aesthetic imperfection. His Entoptic Interval Synthesizer resists the smoothing effects of transcriptive logic and invites us into the topography of neural loss—into a space where creativity is not derived from completion, but from navigation and drift. Here, loss itself becomes an instrument.
Stefan Maier’s Deviant Chain introduces a conlang as speculative phonetics—a cognitive interface sculpted not from natural language but from machinic glossolalia. Collaborating with Alan Martin Segal and Victor Shepardson, Maier conjures a future where human and AI cognition fuse through an incomprehensible linguistic substrate, generated not for clarity but for cognitive estrangement. This interface—glass-glyphic, unsupervised, and irreversibly embodied—rejects linguistic universals in favor of a language born in latent space. Here, the conlang is not a bridge but a biome: one that mutates physiology, perception, and world-modeling into a grotesque hybrid of the digital and the corporeal.
In the work of Maria Sappho and the Chimère collective, interface blooms outward from any singular object or system into an intersubjective practice of multimodal becoming. Traveling through Southern Africa, their AI-artistic experiments are less about output and more about situated community entanglement—the interface as both literal device and philosophical detour, as metaphor and lived experience.
Lyn Hagan brings us into the ghostly mechanics of AI image generation—into what she names "corporate anti-poetic systems." Drawing on Derrida’s Glas and the Pharmakon, she reframes AI as both poison and cure: not an estrangement from creativity but a radical collage, haunted by the dead poets it mimics and mocks. Here, the interface is an apparition, a haunted zombie conjuration, and a space of poetic rupture.
Charlotte Lengersdorf extends the metaphor by returning us to the baroque absurdity of Rube Goldberg machines—interfaces that delight precisely because they foreground their inefficiency. If today's AI interfaces mystify the process behind layers of shimmering UX, Lengersdorf insists on making the "inter" legible again—choreographing the gap rather than sealing it shut.
Others in this issue challenge the very idea that AI interfaces must remain locked in textuality. Agnes Cameron reclaims musical "newness" not as novelty per se, but as an emergent property of improvisational misuse—a philosophy of extended technique that sees possibility in failure and interface as a site of playful resistance.
Charles Hagelsteen offers a scathing (and hilarious) critique of generative AI’s sterile sandbox, calling instead for messy, hackable, knob-twisting environments—Comfyboxes and FX decks where creativity comes not from what AI can do, but from what it cannot fully control. Mastery, in this paradigm, is not about precision but risk, soul, and slop.
From queer ecological musicking (Ying Xuan Chian) to speculative protocol critique (Beatrice Fazi), these contributions resist the reductive framing of the interface as a mere access point. Instead, they explore it as a boundary condition, as socio-technical fiction, and as epistemic glitch-space. They ask not only how we interact with AI, but how AI remakes the very grammar of interactivity.
In this special issue, the interface is less a solved design problem than a philosophical riddle, one that reopens long-standing questions of instrumentality, authorship, agency, and the thresholds of the human. As we tumble past the era of predictable UX into the unruly multiplicity of the post-attention regime, we must ask again and again:
What is the shape of an interface that listens back?
What kinds of worlds does it imagine?
What kinds of beings does it presuppose, exclude, or summon?
These are not merely technical questions—they are the coordinates of a new cultural topology.
The interface after AI is here:
Neither SMOOTH
Nor NEUTRAL
It is ALIVE
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