CCMSAI 2026

Short Concert for the Last 74s of Topsy is a generative audiovisual work that departs from the case of Topsy, an elephant electrocuted in Coney Island in 1903 and filmed by the Edison Manufacturing Company, in order to interrogate the relation between technique, memory, and the asymmetry of power. In this essay, I take the original footage as the perceptual field of a system developed in Max/MSP/Jitter, which translates the pixels of the archive into sound through the technique of sonification, within a paradigm of symbolic AI made of explicit rules and without machine learning. I discuss the idea of a music latent in the image, revealed by a non-human intelligence indifferent to affect: the mapping rules are authorial, and the algorithmic testimony is produced, not discovered. To opt for the legibility of these rules, against the opacity of the black box, is a deliberately ethical and political position, enunciated from the Global South, because it makes inspectable who decides what. Drawing on the philosophy of technology, post-phenomenology, and the critique of the image, in what follows I discuss the non-neutrality of the apparatus, the risk of aestheticizing barbarism, and the exhibition of the work as a possible spectacle. By submitting the piece to the exact seventy-four seconds of the record and by fixing in film only one among the system’s infinite possible outputs, I repeat and denounce the same gesture that turned Topsy’s death into an image.