Playing the Archive: Audiovisual Latent Space Exploration with The Ocular Harpsichord 2.0

Abstract

This paper presents The Ocular Harpsichord 2.0, an audiovisual instrument for exploring small media archives through MIDI-triggered latent space navigation. The aesthetic and formal tendencies in audiovisual collections tend to be hard to grasp and remain underexplored; the instrument makes the interior logic of a bounded corpus legible by letting a performer play it. The system trains on a specific collection and learns how sound and image are tied together in that particular archive. These relations are specific to one collection, shaped by its own textures and rhythms. The performer navigates the archive through gesture and MIDI input, and the audiovisual output follows the collection’s own structure. Using visualization of the latent space through dimensionality reduction, the performer is invited to examine the learned terrain. The result is framed here as an epistemological instrument: a playful, interactive way of exploring and amplifying the inherent aesthetics of an audiovisual data set.