These days, the field of contemporary musical composition and sound art is, in many regards, intertwined with recording processes, editing and data storage in digital space. Although the applied tools may paint a picture of this binary world using representations and metaphors familiar to us from the physical world, what emerges upon closer inspection—or indeed through unorthodox use or intentionally employed measures—are specific effects arising from the peculiarities of the digital. The aesthetics of these characteristics stand out clearly against those of the analog world, whereby the research project Rotting Sounds (Grill, Bovermann and Schilling 2018) focuses in particular on the auditive domain.

Within the scope of the project, concrete experimental setups in the form of long-term sound installations were developed in order to make the effects produced by the digital representation processes audible. On a meta-level several questions we have identified as worth pursuing arose in respect to the general treatment of digital media, especially in terms of its use as a permanent recording medium. In this context the incongruity between the logical, binary-encoded information components of sound data versus the material components of this data manifests itself as an inscription on physical materials, which are by nature fundamentally flawed and subject to inevitable erosion.

Moreover, the aspect of encoding deserves special attention here, that is to say the conversion of analog sound information into digital bitstreams. Analog processes are—apart from a quantum physical perspective—continuous in time and energy; digital data, by contrast, is discrete. The transition from one domain to the other demands a fundamental reinterpretation of signals, which is often connected to a reduction of redundancy by means of compression algorithms. Since the grammar used by this kind of encoding is typically not robust to data errors, decoding can produce artistically inspiring (cf. Menkman 2011), albeit difficult to predict, artefacts.

Today the data density of digital media is typically in the submicrometre range, thus due to their small size these structures go undetected by human perception. Underlying the Fragments and this companion book is an approach which arises on the one hand out of the (im)possibilities of reading/accessing the contained data, on the other hand out of the interpretation of potentially damaged and encoded data but also out of the deterioration process of the data over very long periods of time in the sense of “deep time” (Zielinski 2006). We refer specifically to the context of the Audi­torium of Rotting Sounds, the acoustic space employed by us as the site of several sound installations we conceived to evolve and reciprocally interfere over a span of several years. Parallel to this, the digital copy of an archive has accumulated, being added to not only by sound samples taken hourly from the experimental setups but also by a mass of related materials including the sculptural heap of Fragments (cf. Leibetseder et al. 2022).

Research processes and artistic work are regarded in this context as entirely synonymous. Tapping, setting and interpreting are the key concepts in the Fragments project. The digital medium along with its process of change over time is so utterly unfamiliar and unfathomable that it must first be analytically tapped. In turn, the multitude of explorable degrees of freedom demands an informed but essentially intuitive setting of priorities as a source of ever-new starting points for experimental processes. In many cases their aesthetic findings run contrary to our expectations, or they are marked by a microscopic subtlety that calls for interpretative curiosity and openness.

The Fragments project is a faithful companion to Rotting Sounds, its alter ego so to speak. If Rotting Sounds is an abstract meta-construct that conceptually holds together the various approaches of our research, then Frag­ments serves as the grounded home base, an area where data and materials can collect permanently, a site for processes of erosion and fermentation to take place, a docking point for artistic interventions and media manifestations. The art book before you is one such manifestation, its paper an amalgam of data and materials that transforms and transmits the experimentation space of the Auditorium of Rotting Sounds. We set our sights on new resonances and look forward to whatever someone may one day read into it.