The unconcealed machine: on the aesthetics of the Klavierautomat

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.