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Research

Hiroshi Mehata is a Tokyo-based visual and sound artist and independent researcher. His practice-based research examines how noise, improvisation and error can restore a bodily sense of contact between people. The work grows out of more than twenty years of noise and avant-garde performance, and over fifteen years of carrying that improvisational sense into painting and installation.

Visual Image of research philosophy

The Aesthetic of Error Trilogy

​The Aesthetic of Error is a three-part research project. It asks what happens to human communication when meaning is reduced to signs, text and algorithms. Each part approaches this question from a different angle, through Tone, Ma and Error as forms of embodied knowledge.

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  • Part I — under review

  • Part II — The Mass of Zero: Against a World Reduced to Signs — Somatic Tone, Error, and the Reclaiming of Shared Field (2026)

  • Part III —under review

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Part II — The Mass of Zero (2026)

Core concept of The Mass of Zero - 4 stage model

Human communication is never only an exchange of words. It is the shared creation of a field through tone, and it always carries the small frustration of not quite reaching the other person. In an age where signs crowd out this bodily sense, Part II asks how a shared field can be reclaimed. It proposes the "Mass of Zero", a pure tone in which symbolic meaning has fallen away, and a "Posture of Passive Improvisation".

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  • Published: 9 July 2026, Research Catalogue

  • DOI: 10.22501/rc.4327675

  • License: CC BY-NC-ND

  • Keywords: artistic research, improvisation, somatic tone, error, noise music, Ma, field co-creation, embodied knowledge

  • Read the exposition →

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Key Concepts

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  • Tone — all the sensory information that arises in a live space — Ma, breath, the quality of a voice, gesture, movement and environmental conditions — always generated through improvisational action.

  • Shared Field — the field of contact that people co-create through Tone, with the frustration of not quite reaching the other built in from the start.

  • Mass of Zero — pure Tone in which symbolic meaning has collapsed. Like Ma, it holds every possible interpretation at once, and so carries more weight than any single sound.

  • Passive Improvisation — the capacity to respond to the sounds of others and the accidents of the environment through instantaneous bodily reflex, receiving errors and foreign bodies as gifts.

  • Ma (間) — not the absence of sound, but a state in which all possible interpretations are held in superposition, demanding extreme concentration.

  • Error — the unforeseen deviation that can update a performer and a field, rather than destroy them.​

There is a blog series composed of outtakes from "Mass of Zero." You can find the blog here →

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