In Conversation: Marcos Micozzi on Sound, Memory, and Digital Residue
- Amy Jiang
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
In the feedback loops of machine learning, certain bodies, cultures, and ways of knowing are made visible, distorted, or erased. Like ghosts—excluded yet ever-present—they haunt the machine. They slip through algorithmic blind spots, bend systems’ logic, and disrupt with glitches and ruptures that unsettle computational control. But ghosts don’t just haunt—they rewire. They assert presence, reframe meaning, and speak in forms the system was never trained to understand. Through cracks in the loop, they reemerge as designers of new imaginaries for themselves and for the communities the system failed to see. Ghosts in the Feedback Loop is a virtual exhibition that invites artists to work inside those cracks—to treat algorithmic systems not as endpoints of automation but as haunted infrastructures alive with memory, loss, and rebellion. This interview is part of TechnoMirage, UAAD’s latest curatorial & publishing project exploring the intersections of artificial intelligence, speculative design, and collective imagination. Emerging from a multi-format event series—including a virtual exhibition, an online panel co-hosted with Parsons, and an IRL gathering of workshops, talks, and performances—the publication extends these dialogues into an archival form.
About the Artists
Marcos Micozzi is an Argentine audio engineer, spatial sound artist, and multimedia performer exploring the intersections of sound, space, memory, and material form. Combining architecture and audio engineering, he transforms live audio performances into sculptural artifacts using VR, 3D printing, and motion data, as in XYZ Sound Sculptures. His work merges technical skill with artistic authorship, expanding listening into a spatial, embodied experience. Internationally recognized, Marcos has received sponsorship from Sennheiser / Dear Reality, won Best Audio Project at the SAE International Awards (2022), and presented at festivals including Berlin Fashion Film Festival and Brisbane Street Art Festival.
Hef Prentice is a Barcelona-based designer, photographer, illustrator, stylist, sculptor, and 3D animator, originally from Argentina. Working primarily with 35mm film, she captures intimate atmospheres blending magical realism with contemporary visions of the feminine and mythical. Her 3D work creates digital worlds that blur reality and futurism, evoking fantastical landscapes and fairy-tale figures. Internationally recognized, she has collaborated with brands and artists including Sita Abellan, Kim Kardashian, J Balvin, and Viktor & Rolf, exhibited at venues like MOMA and Times Square, and contributed to projects featured by Dazed, Artwort, Vogue Italia, and Mutek AR.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your background, and how your work connects to the theme “Ghosts in the Feedback Loop”?
I am an Argentinian-born multidisciplinary artist with a background spanning architecture, audio engineering, and machine learning. After living in Australia from 2018 to 2024, I have recently relocated to Berlin, Germany, where I continue to develop work at the intersection of art, sound, and technology.
Lately, I have been meditating on the concept of time, specifically through the lens of sound. In the landscapes of sound, memory and space are never fixed. Sound is bound to time, and trying to grasp it is as ambitious as trying to grasp time itself—a fleeting moment, as Clarice Lispector writes in Água Viva.
With the rise of technology, what once seemed impossible has opened to discussion. We cannot freeze time, at least not yet, but through digital practices we can collect memories of it—tracing the movement and gesture of sound as it travels through space and transforming them into physical and digital forms that outlast performances.
My practice often unfolds through collaboration, particularly with artist Hef Prentice and musicians from Desmond Cheese. Together, we developed XYZ Sound Sculptures, a project where sound becomes material. Sound folds into forms, blooms like a living structure, and takes on a presence beyond time. These shapes reframe how we perceive and remember sonic experiences. By giving structure to the ephemeral, XYZ Sound Sculptures invites reflection on time, memory, and the unseen forces that shape our experience within sound and space.
Here, sound can be experienced spatially—it can be paused, revisited, and navigated. Sound is no longer linear but constant, existing everywhere at once.
Q: How do you perceive AI—as a tool, a collaborator, a medium, a subject, or something else? And how does that shape your artistic process?
I see AI primarily as a collaborator. From my experience, the main virtue of working with AI is that it does not share my perspective. If I treat it only as an extension of myself, it inevitably reflects my biases, but as a collaborator, it can introduce perspectives I might not arrive at on my own. I often use AI in a way that allows it to ask questions back to me and help me reflect on my work, rather than me simply asking questions. This creates a dialogue, a process of co-thinking that becomes generative for the work.
Q: What futures does your featured work gesture toward or warn against? Who do you imagine as your audience, and how do you hope they are impacted?
I believe that as we move deeper into digital futures and our experiences in virtual spaces expand, spatial sound will become increasingly important, and the need for archives that recognize this spatiality will continue to grow. My work gestures toward a future where sound is experienced in 3D, possibly with 4DOF, and in non-linear ways.
At the same time, I feel my practice has moved further away from sound itself. Here, sound becomes a pathway to a larger topic: time. I am focused on time in this era of digital acceleration and on how moving too fast, which is inevitable, leaves behind potential richness in the form of residual material. I am interested in grasping the moment, reconstructing time, and exploring it as a non-linear phenomenon.
For example, the spatial data left behind from a live performance, where a sound existed at a specific moment along the X, Y, and Z axes, might otherwise feel like waste once the performance is over. The session remains, but the event has already passed. By revisiting and transforming this residual spatial information, I can reinterpret it, stretch the experience of time, revisit moments, and create new temporalities. It makes me wonder how many digital traces we leave behind every day, unused, traces that could hold unexpected potential if we took the time to look back. Becoming aware of these micro digital worlds opens the possibility to study them, expand them, and transform them into macro digital ecosystems, like the ones realized in XYZ Sound Sculptures.
I do not want to limit the audience’s interaction with this material and its potential. The beauty of the project lies in the unseen and unimagined worlds that exist in digital spaces. There is potential for immersive sound, visualized forms, or entirely unexpected experiences. Moving quickly in the digital world leaves an abundance of residual material, and revisiting it opens creative, reflective, and archival possibilities. These traces become a resource, a starting point to imagine, reconstruct, and reconfigure time, space, and experience.
Q: Are there particular communities, histories, or environments your work remains in conversation with? How do those relationships evolve over time?
I collaborate closely with Hef Prentice, who works with digital sculpture, and with musicians such as Desmond Cheese. My thinking has been shaped by a variety of influences. Modern architecture introduced me to ideas about the fourth dimension, which resonate deeply with how I think about space and temporality in my work. I approach sound from a material and architectural perspective, interested in how it can inhabit physical spaces, be transformed digitally, and then return to a tactile, tangible reality.
Q: What do you see as the most urgent threats or uncertainties we may face in the coming decade with the rise of AI?
There are countless ways in which AI could develop both for good or bad. I personally think that the main uncertainty ties back to my ongoing exploration of time. The speed at which we are moving technologically, socially, and culturally really is unprecedented. AI accelerates change in ways we can barely anticipate and it challenges our ability to adapt to the evolving environment.
Q: Are there any theories, books, or artists you’d like to recommend in your current areas of interest?
Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva continues to influence how I think about the present moment and the impossibility of capturing it.
I also find inspiration in HKW’s catalogues Looking at Music (DNA #8) and Sound – Space – Sense (DNA #21) curated by Lina Brion and Detlef Diederichsen, which explore the materiality of sound and its relationship to memory and the body.
Hef Prentice often refers to works like Jesús Alonso Burgos’ Teoría e Historia del Hombre Artificial, Helga Nowotny’s In AI We Trust, and Susan Schneider’s Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind. These texts inform our conceptual framework and help us navigate the dialogue between human perception and machine intelligence.
Lead Editor: Amy Xiaofan Jiang
Assistant Editor: Paridhi Garg
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