This paper analyses the Klavierautomat (piano automaton), a robotic piano player, framing it as a complex cultural artefact with a productive aesthetic and philosophical ambiguity. The analysis synthesises insights from the philosophy of technology, media theory, and hauntology to theorise the tension between the instrument`s material presence and its spectral effects. This theoretical framework is explored through two original, practice-based case studies. The first, Etüden für Klavierautomat, showcases the instrument's capacity for inhuman precision and speed, realising a technological sublime of computational perfection. In contrast, the second study, Stuttering Calls of the Unencoded, leverages systemic failure and feedback loops, exposing the Klavierautomat as a medium for a hauntological sublime found in the glitches and spectral residues of a flawed digital-mechanical translation process. The tension between these two artistic approaches reveals a wide aesthetic range of the instrument, from a tool for realising flawless logic to a medium for channelling hauntological imperfection. This capacity renders the Klavierautomat a liminal object, one that gives physical and acoustic form to algorithmic processes while staging the spectral haunting of its own mechanical nature.
Giannoutakis et al. (Tue,) studied this question.