Mapping Noizart: A Cartography of Imperfection, Tactile Memory, and Performed Absence

Diego Alonso Piñera Torres

University of Music and Performing Arts Graz

Introduction

How do imperfections – understood not as flaws but as active, revealing qualities of fragmented archival materials – influence an audience’s emotional experience? And, how can an audiovisual artifact function as a medium to explore this influence, viewing error or glitch as a potential aesthetic event?

This exhibition sets out to answer this question by considering audiovisual artifact as a distinct form of musical analysis by visualizing the sonic qualities and temporal arrangement of a section of my piece Concerto for an Absent Performer. The exploration begins by outlining the project’s coordinates, reflecting on the damaged sound archive that inspired it and the concepts of spectrality and absence that surfaced during the early stages of the composition. At its core, the exhibition delves into the iterative development of 4 post-composition and post-performance artifacts, detailing how each experiment became a method for examining the interaction between the player piano and the archive, both integral components of the Concerto. Finally, this practical analysis is brought into direct conversation with the theoretical framework that guided it, drawing on the ideas of Arthur C. Danto, Mark Fisher, and perception theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim to articulate the findings.

My research grows out of a practice that brings together my classical training as a pianist with creative and analytical work using digital media. The relationship I have as a pianist and composer with the internal logic of the original material –its form, structure, and performative gestures—is fundamental for understanding the rationale behind some of the decisions. As in the composition process from where the original material comes from, I do not approach it with the aim of reconstruction, but rather as an analytical frame of reference for reflecting about the performance of absence, using score notating symbols as framework and visual language. This prior understanding of the piece’s original structure allows me to identify and analyze more precisely how its disintegration becomes visible and audible in the artifacts. It serves as a tool for examining the structure of the ruin from a different perspective.

This approach is in constant dialogue with my work in the digital realm. Technological tools such as algorithmic automation for the visuals or the use of sampling derivated from the original performance are the means through which I carry out and document this research. The choices I make in the digital environment are naturally shaped by my relationship with musical language and interpretive practice. At the same time, the way technology processes this material reveals unexpected facets of the original source, creating a feedback loop between creation and analysis. The aim of this work, therefore, is to use this integrated approach to examine how technological mediation reshapes memory and our perception of sonic material.

Genesis: The Instrument and the Performance

The main instrument in my work, Concerto for an Absent Performer, and the focus of these experiments, is a sampler constructed from fragments of the damaged audio archive of the recorded recital. Unlike traditional samplers that aim for consistency and fidelity, this instrument subverts that logic. Each MIDI note played by the player piano does not trigger a single, predictable sound. Instead, it selects one sample from a set of up to eight different fragments associated with the same note. The choice is made either randomly or according to the velocity of the key, and all the material comes from the same source. As a result, the same mechanical gesture can produce different sounds each time, making the process inherently unpredictable and allowing the archive’s inconsistent multiplicity to manifest during the performance.

The performance centers on a fundamental tension between the visible gesture and the resulting sound. The audience witnesses the precise, physical action of the automaton at the keyboard—a gesture that suggests control—but hears a sonic response that is fragmented, unpredictable, and marked by digital data corruption. The piano does not produce only its expected sound. Instead, it becomes a medium that, when played, brings forth echoes and scars of a past event and technological failure. This dislocation—between present, controlled action and spectral, uncontrollable sound—forms the conceptual core that subsequent audiovisual iterations will continue to explore.

A Framework for Perceptual Analysis

For approaching the audiovisual artifacts in this research, I will draw upon several principles from Gestalt psychology, as articulated by Rudolf Arnheim(Arnheim, 1974). The core insight of theory is, that perception does not passively record the world, but actively shapes it, organizing visual stimuli into the most stable and economical structure available—a tendency encapsulated in the Law of Prägnanz ^[1]. This drive toward good form is not an abstract ideal but emerges in a handful of concrete organizational impulses that shape how we see.

Figure and Ground
At the root of perceptual organization lies the distinction between figure and ground. We instinctively parse any visual field, isolating a focal object (the figure) from a more diffuse backdrop (the ground). The classic Rubin Vase demonstrates this: perception oscillates between seeing a vase and two faces in profile, but never both at once. The mind, it seems, cannot tolerate ambiguity for long.

Proximity
The Law of Proximity suggests that spatial nearness breeds unity. Scatter a handful of dots across a page, and those that sit closer together will be read as a group—columns or rows, depending on their spacing. Our perceptual machinery, ever impatient, latches onto the shortest possible connections.

Similarity
In parallel, the Law of Similarity guides us to cluster elements that share visual traits—shape, size, hue. Present a grid of circles and squares, and we cannot help but see rows of circles, rows of squares, even if their arrangement is otherwise arbitrary. But the mind is not content with mere grouping; it seeks coherence, even where information is missing.

Closure
The Law of Closure enables us to perceive complete forms even when parts are absent. Three open angles become a triangle; a broken arc resolves into a circle. Our perceptual system fills the gaps, insisting on wholeness.

Good Continuation
Finally, the principle of Good Continuation describes our tendency to follow smooth, unbroken paths. When two lines intersect, we prefer to see two continuous trajectories crossing, not four disjointed segments meeting at a point.

Arnheim leverages these principles to explain how balance, weight, and direction emerge within artistic composition. For my own analysis, I employ this framework not merely to catalogue organizational tendencies in my artifacts, but to show the moments when these laws are strained or deliberately subverted, and to consider what visual and conceptual effects such disruptions may yield.

This approach, I hope, will illuminate not only the mechanics of perception but also the expressive charge that arises when order and disorder collide within the audiovisual field.

Iterative Cartographies: The Analysis of Artifacts

The Initial Map and its Limits

My first attempt at creating a visual map of my Concerto for an Absent Performer took the form of an initial video analysis focusing on its third movement, Adagio:

Conceived with a descriptive function, its aim was to clarify the compositional structure by offering a literal representation of the sampler’s internal logic—understood as what I call a repository of accumulated memories. To achieve this, a visual canvas was constructed in MadMapper, where the MIDI data from the automaton’s performance was translated via Max/MSP and OSC into control signals. These signals governed the opacity of each visual fragment based on the note’s velocity, making the intensity of the machine’s touch visible. Crucially, when a key was pressed, the system illuminated all associated fragments simultaneously. The screen, therefore, displayed not a single choice, but the simultaneous and flickering presence of all associated samples.

This initial map was both useful and necessary, as it revealed the internal organization of the material and the fragmentary nature of the recovered memory. However, its very emphasis on descriptive clarity also made its limitations apparent. The artifact showed which fragments were sounding, but fell short when exploring how the damaged condition of the archive—its texture, noise, and materiality—could shape a listener’s perceptual and affective experience. Imperfection was visible as fragmentation, but the artifact was not yet designed to examine imperfection as an expressive agent in its own right. This prompted the need for a different cartographic approach, one that shifted from only score representation to the investigation of experience. What follows is an analysis of the iterative process that emerged from this need.

Linear Gesture and Its Ghosts

To delve into experimentation, it was necessary to take a step back from the compositional logic of the Concerto and conduct an initial experiment that would serve as a baseline. The aim of this first iteration was to reveal the fundamental behavior of the sampler I constructed from the damaged archive when subjected to a linear task. Its purpose was to simulate an attempt to play Mozart’s sonata in its original sequence. The visualization, achieved by illuminating each note head over a the stable, sliced score, addressed a key question: What does this attempt sound/look like? The outcome is a performance whose melodic and rhythmic outlines remain recognizable, yet are perceptibly flawed. The timeline of the visualized dots in the score is clearly coherent in a linear progression, but the execution is continually disrupted by sonic artifacts—traces of other samples mapped to the same key—that intrude upon the musical line. Perceptually, while this approach reinforced a clear figure-ground distinction, the figure itself—the musical gesture—emerged as unstable, already inhabited by extraneous echoes.

The Materiality of a Digital Ruin

One of the next experiment redefined the scope. While the first iteration explored how a damaged memory system might sound when carrying out an ordered task, this new artifact considered how the material condition of that damage could be made visible. The focus moved from the archive’s content to the medium itself. The Mozart score, which had served as a reference, was set aside. The objective was no longer to track deviation from an original, but to examine the texture of deviation itself. The method involved a direct relationship between sound and image. I replaced the original staffs with a new set of white lines against black background that had a more abstract quality. This new staffs appeared on the screen, but their stability depended on the quality of the audio signal. When the sound was clear, the lines remained intact. As noise became prominent, the lines would fragment, flicker, or disappear, and would attempt to re-form when the audio stabilized.

From a Gestalt perspective, the artifact challenges perceptual expectations. The staff lines, usually perceived as stable elements, struggle to remain continuous against a background that actively interrupts and erases them. Our perception tries to complete the broken lines and follow a coherent path, but the artifact resists this, producing a visual experience of interruption and fragility that mirrors the act of listening to a degraded recording.

This experiment demonstrates two things. First, noise and failure are not only sonic events but can serve as structural principles in the visual domain, turning degradation into a visual language. Second, instability becomes a persistent condition rather than an occasional anomaly. Imperfection is no longer a secondary effect, but the central subject, allowing for an analysis of how the perception of material decay can generate its own affective and conceptual significance.

A Weaving Memory

In parallel with the exploration of material degradation, another line of experimentation focused on visualizing the act of memory itself—not as the retrieval of data, but as an associative process. The central question shifted: how can we visually represent a system’s attempt to find or create connections between scattered fragments? The answer took shape as a connective network created in Touch Designer, a visual system that draws lines between notes activated by the automaton, mapping emerging relationships in real time.

In the first phase of this idea, the network was superimposed over a stable background: the moving Mozart score. In this controlled environment, the artifact applied Gestalt principles in a constructive way. Similarity (the uniform red color of the network) and Proximity (the linking of notes close in time) allowed the network to be perceived as a coherent informational layer, distinct from the score. The principle of Common Fate made these lines appear as a single constellation forming and dissolving. This experiment revealed a visualization of the associative process. It is crucial, however, to distinguish this visualization from a conventional map. A map represents a fixed, pre-existing territory. The network, instead, functions more like a constellation. It does not discover connections that were already latently present; rather, it visualizes the very act of projecting meaning onto scattered points, creating ephemeral patterns whose existence depends entirely on the system’s act of connection. It is a visualization of sense-making as a creative, not a documentary, act.

In this last iteration, the connective network was transplanted onto the visually unstable environment of the degraded staff explored earlier. Here, the conceptual tension of the research is made explicit, bringing two perceptual forces into direct conflict: a constructive, ordering force (the network, guided by Proximity and Common Fate) and a deconstructive, entropic force (the unraveling staff, which denies Closure and Good Continuation).

The experience of this final artifact is one of profound cognitive and perceptual dissonance. The viewer’s attention is caught in a crossfire. The eye, guided by the constructive principles of Gestalt, is drawn to the white lines of the network, attempting to follow their trajectories and perceive them as a coherent figure. Yet this attempt is constantly sabotaged by the deconstructive behavior of the background. The ground is not passive; it is an active agent of erasure that makes any stable perception impossible. There is no visual hierarchy, no stable resting point. This may generate a specific affective response in the viewer: a feeling of frustration, or perhaps a different kind of aesthetic experience found in embracing the instability. The experience is not one of observing a struggle, but of having one’s own perceptual system enlisted in that struggle.

This perpetual battle for perceptual stability aligns directly with Arthur Danto’s philosophical inquiries into what distinguishes art from mere real things. For Danto, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, art achieves this distinction through a process of transfiguration, where a commonplace object—in this case, a corrupted digital file, a technical glitch, a “mere real thing” ^[2]—is elevated into a vehicle for meaning. This is not a physical transformation, but a conceptual one, granted by a context of interpretation, theory, and artistic intention.

This transfiguration is achieved not by hiding the flaw, but by using the medium’s own properties rhetorically. A transparent medium, like a clean window or a perfect high-fidelity recording, attempts to erase itself to give us unmediated access to the world. My artifacts, particularly this final iteration, do the opposite: they make the medium “opaque”^[3]. The goal is not to present a clear picture of a memory, but to draw the viewer’s attention to the very apparatus of mediation itself—its logic, its materiality, and, most importantly, its failures. The flickering lines, the unstable network, the entire perceptual crossfire are rhetorical devices. They are the voice of the medium speaking about its own condition, its own struggle to contain and represent the data it holds.

This focus on the medium itself, rather than on a transparent representation, allows the artifact to comment on the nature of technologically-mediated memory. It suggests that this form of memory is not a stable picture to be retrieved, but an unstable process that must be constantly re-negotiated. The perceptual effort required to parse the image becomes analogous to the cognitive effort of remembering. What is visualized here is precisely that effort. The network represents the generative act of recollection—the impulse to connect disparate data points into a coherent narrative. The disintegrating background, in turn, embodies the material decay of the archive and the entropic pull towards noise and forgetting. It is in this sense that the commonplace digital error is transfigured into an aesthetic event. Its specific conceptual and affective charge arises from this visualized dialectic: the tension between a system’s persistent attempt to structure information and the inherent instability of the material medium itself.

The Inhabited Archive: Anatomy of a Digital Presence

Examining the different iterations shows that these artifacts do more than represent damaged memory; they enact a spectral presence. To understand this, it is helpful to turn to Mark Fisher’s concept of hauntology (Fisher, 2014). Fisher identified the signature of analog hauntology in the crackle of vinyl, a noise that reveals both the passage of time and the materiality of the medium. Yet, as Fisher himself notes, the digital era—with its promise of perfect copies and total archives—seems to erase this kind of material nostalgia. Digital memory, with its apparent omnipresence, threatens to eliminate the very possibility of forgetting. The question, then, is transformed: if the specter no longer arises from gradual decay, where does it emerge within a digital archive?

My work suggests that digital hauntology is born not from slow erosion but from sudden catastrophe and fracture. The ruin in my archive is not the result of use, but of accidental collapse: bit crushing, data loss, a system’s broken logic. Here, artistic intervention becomes essential. In the face of a digital archive that risks overwhelming loss with abundance, my approach acts as a subjective intervention. It is a deliberate strategy of selection and fragmentation, intended to isolate and intensify the traces that matter to me. By constructing a sampler from these remnants, the practice does not hide their origin but instead amplifies their inherent spectral charge.

This exploration of digital ruin places my work in conversation with other artistic practices that have addressed memory through the degradation of the medium. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops ^[4], for example, offers a meditation on the poetics of analog decay, where magnetic tape physically unravels in a gradual process of erosion. Similarly, The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time ^[5] uses samples to narrate the collapse of biological memory and its stages. My research is situated within this same territory of mediated memory, but focuses specifically on the aesthetics of digital failure and the mechanics of a fractured technological memory. In this context, the player piano does not forget as a human subject might; instead, its precise gesture tirelessly reactivates the wound of the archive. The performance thus becomes not a chronicle of forgetting, but an exercise in mapping that examines the very structure of failure.

Conclusion

This research originated from a twofold question: how can the imperfections of a damaged archive influence the affective experience, and how can an audiovisual artifact serve as a medium to explore that influence? Throughout the analysis of an iterative process, the exhibition has argued that the flaws of the archive are not mere technical defects, but active agents that participate in the generation of meaning. The visual experiments demonstrated that the affective charge of these artifacts emerges from a fundamental perceptual tension: the conflict, analyzed from a Gestalt perspective, between the mind’s impulse to find coherence and the material evidence of disintegration. Thus, the audiovisual artifact revealed itself not only as a map of a memory, but as a method in itself: a medium for visualizing and analyzing the mechanics of a fractured memory and its spectral manifestation in the digital environment.

Reflection on this process suggests several relevant implications. First, it reinforces the value of practice-led research, in which the creation of artifacts not only illustrates pre-existing ideas but becomes the main driver for the generation of knowledge. The iterative development of the visualizations allowed us to discover and articulate aspects of both the compositional work and the archive that were not evident a priori. Second, the work contributes to the discussion on digital hauntology. By focusing on the aesthetics of digital catastrophe—such as bit crushing and abrupt fragmentation—rather than analog decay, it proposes a specific understanding of how spectrality persists in media that promise perfection, finding its expression precisely in the fractures of the system.

Finally, as in all research, this work raises more questions than it answers, outlining possible future paths. The present exhibition has focused on the analysis of the artifact and its potential, but a later phase could incorporate a reception study to empirically investigate how an audience interprets this perceptual struggle and what emotional responses it generates. Furthermore, the artifacts developed so far are non-interactive. This raises the question: what new understandings might emerge if an interactive version were designed, where the viewer could manipulate the parameters of the visualization and actively participate in the reconstructive act of memory? These questions remain open, not as a shortcoming, but as testimony to a fertile territory that deserves further exploration.

Bibliography

Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

Danto, Arthur C. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014.