Machines, Ghosts and Lost Futures: A co-curatorial text on STWST84x12 HAUNTED by Maite Cajaraville & Gisle Frøysland.
Paul Magee is hearing voices.
Voices generated by his piece SIGNAL, by sixteen audio generators that speak by modulating sine waves. The dials on each box rotate back and forth at different rates, emitting the characteristic whooping sound of signal generators as they move towards their designated frequencies. As the generators attempt to match the frequencies of a human voice, something resembling speech begins to emerge. The machine tries to speak, in an endless attempt to become human.
At a time when AI and the “generative” are increasingly associated with ethereal, bodiless entities, cloud-based models and apparently immaterial processes, Piksel remains faithful to its principles. For STWST84x12 HAUNTED, we bring hardware, sound generated through knobs, and artistic practices that move beyond the computer as the sole working tool to engage with technology in its most physical dimension: capacitors, chips, motherboards, oscillators, resistors and knobs.
Things.
Because behind every apparently immaterial technology there are machines, cables, minerals, energy, infrastructures and physical territories. AI does not live in the cloud. It lives in data centers.
AI in data centers, wanting to become human; electronic components haunting their ghosts.
Piksel has always been interested in what happens when the technological black box is opened: when technologies are taken apart, exposed, hacked, repurposed and brought back down to earth. SIGNAL makes this process strangely literal. Its mechanisms are visible, its attempts imperfect. The voice does not simply emerge from an invisible computational process; we can hear and almost see the physical effort required to construct it.
But perhaps it is not only the machines that are haunted. Perhaps the electronic arts scene itself is becoming haunted.
Recent texts by Román Torre and José Ramón Alcalá Mellado point to an absence that is becoming increasingly visible. Alcalá, writing about the new presentation of the Museo Reina Sofía collection, reflects on the disappearance from its historical narrative of a generation of artists who contributed to the emergence of contemporary digital culture during the second half of the twentieth century. Román Torre similarly questions the absence of New Media Art from contemporary museum narratives, arguing that this absence cannot be understood simply as an aesthetic gap.
We would like to expand this question beyond museums, to the cultural narratives of cities, regions and countries, and to the infrastructures that have allowed these practices to develop.
For decades, festivals, collectives, independent spaces and experimental networks have provided a context for artistic practices that engage critically with technology. Some of the most important of these initiatives have disappeared or are struggling to survive. FutureEverything is gone, the European Media Art Platform EMAP, came close to disappearing, Institute for Network Cultures, and Piksel itself hang by a thread, among others.
This seems particularly paradoxical at a moment when technology has become so deeply embedded in almost every aspect of contemporary life. If technological systems increasingly mediate how we communicate, work, produce knowledge, understand territories and imagine the future, it is difficult to understand why the artistic practices that critically examine, dissect and deconstruct these systems—and the spaces in which these practices are produced and presented—should be considered less relevant now.
We wonder whether what we are witnessing is simply a generational transformation within the art scenes of different countries, or whether something broader is changing in the cultural value assigned to technological critique. Has electronic art become haunted by its own history? And what happens when the spaces that have maintained that critical conversation begin to disappear?
The question is not about preserving New Media Art as a historical category, nor about defending a particular generation of artists. It concerns the possibility of maintaining spaces in which technology can still be approached critically, experimentally and artistically, and where different relationships with technological development can be imagined.
In a society increasingly organized through interfaces that conceal both the physical infrastructures of technology and the systems of control operating beneath them, Piksel proposes deconstruction as a method: opening devices, exposing components, understanding systems and bringing technology back down to earth.
In this sense, STWST and Piksel share more than a history of collaboration. They belong to a constellation of independent cultural structures that have developed alongside technological change while maintaining a critical distance from it.
STWST is a sister of Piksel. A sister and a re-sister, borrowing here the title of Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Re-Sisters. The word inevitably takes us back to electronics: re-sister, resistor, resistance. To components, but also to collectives; to the physical construction of technological systems, but also to the cultural structures that question them and keep other possibilities open.
This is where resistance becomes connected to the resistor, and where the materiality of SIGNAL connects to the collective dimension of the exhibition.
Malte Steiner’s anticomic: livecomic VR approaches the haunted technological space from another direction.
If SIGNAL produces a voice without a body, anticomic constructs a world from which the story has disappeared.
Steiner deconstructs the visual language of comics, separating graphical elements from their original narratives and placing them inside a virtual environment. The visitor navigates through radically reduced black-and-white figures, ornaments and fragments that seem to suggest dialogues, actions and situations without ever resolving into a coherent story.
The resulting anticomics are abstract and deliberately dysfunctional as comics. Something remains, but the narrative that once connected these elements—or that we expect to connect them—is absent. By immersing the visitor within these fragments, Steiner creates an out-of-joint space-time populated by traces of possible stories.
The reduction of the drawings to minimal figures opens them to other readings and, perhaps, to futures that were once imagined but have now become impossible.
In different ways, both works operate through deconstruction. Magee decomposes the human voice into frequencies and distributes it across physical machines that repeatedly attempt to reconstruct it. Steiner decomposes the comic into its graphical elements, removing the narrative structure that would normally organist them and allowing the visitor to move among its remains.
One tries to construct presence from components; the other produces absence from fragments.
Their ghosts emerge precisely in this unstable territory between recognition and disappearance.
This territory also resonates with the position in which independent technological art practices find themselves today. They inhabit a space between what remains from earlier technological imaginaries and futures that are increasingly defined elsewhere: by platforms, corporations, political agendas and systems whose infrastructures tend to remain invisible.
Piksel attempts to inhabit this space between what is no longer there and what may never be. Not in order to preserve a technological past intact, but to keep some of its questions, contradictions and unrealised possibilities active in the present.
Perhaps this is one possible function of the haunted: not simply the return of what has disappeared, but the persistence of possibilities that refuse to disappear completely.
And perhaps this is also what re-sist-er-ance can mean here: keeping those possibilities in circulation through machines, components, artistic practices, spaces and collectives.
Piksel is very happy to join our STWST re-sisters for HAUNTED, and we thank them for an invitation that allows us, at least for a few days, to become deconstructed rather than haunted. <3
References
- José Ramón Alcalá Mellado, “¿Por qué no hay obras de New Media Art en el Museo Reina Sofía?”, El Hype, 2026.
- Román Torre, “¿Es el museo contemporáneo, realmente contemporáneo?”, 2026.
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Paul Magee (GB) || Signal
Sound/kinetic Installation
Signal is a vocoder: A computer controlled bank of 16 signal generators that speaks by modulating sine waves to match the frequencies of a human voice. The dials on each box rotate back and forth and at different rates, the boxes emitting the characteristic whooping sound of a signal generator as the dials turn to their designated frequencies. In amidst all this noise, voices can be heard saying something.
https://stwst84x12.stwst.at/signal
Malte Steiner (DE) || anticomic: livecomic VR
Immersive VR-Installation, 2026
anticomic: livecomic VR is a virtual reality work which lets you navigate through graphical ornaments of comic media, extremely minimalized and black/white like the other works of Malte Steiner’s anticomic cycle. The installation is made with the free open source game engine Godot. It can be experienced with the VR Headset and the two hand controls.
https://stwst84x12.stwst.at/anticomic_livecomic_vr
A curatorial text by Piksel – Maite Cajaraville & Gisle Frøysland. Piksel co-curates STWST84x12 HAUNTED together with STWST the works by Paul Magee and Malte Steiner.
Piksel is an international network and annual event for electronic art and technological freedom. Part workshop, part festival, it is organized in Bergen, Norway, and involves participants from more than a dozen countries exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects, doing workshops, performances and discussions on the aesthetics and politics of free technologies. PIKSEL Festival for kunst og fri teknologi, Bergen, Norway, https://piksel.no/
Pictures: anticomic: livecomic VR (Video still: Malte Steiner), Signal (Picture: Paul Magee)
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