Real-time texture: from matter to pixel as sensory and performative language

Since ancient times, visual texture has served as a way of expressing rhythm, matter and presence in art.

In traditional impasto techniques (such as those used by Antoni Tàpies), texture results from the gesture, the accident, and the physical layer that forms the image itself. Grain, roughness, and imperfections are not merely visual effects but serve as imprints of a process and a story: a tangible corporeality that the viewer can sense and recognize.

With the advent of digital technologies, this concept of texture undergoes a profound transformation. In contemporary digital art, texture is no longer a static surface but becomes a lively, mutable and ever-evolving phenomenon.

Digital texture operates in real time: it modulates, feedbacks, and reacts to external stimuli such as sound, data, or gesture. Essentially, what was once a physical imprint now manifests as behaviour through feedback. What is visible no longer deposits on the surface: it simply occurs.

A key element in this transition is procedural noise, a phenomenon that connects tactile textures to digital textures.

Algorithms like Perlin noise draw inspiration from natural and organic patterns, such as the distribution of materials or physical vibrations, and translate them into the digital realm. This creates visual surfaces that mimic and amplify natural phenomena. These processes do more than just imitate matter – they alter how we perceive it, transforming the intangible tactile.

This dialogue between materiality, gesture, chance, and technology invites us to reconsider what we understand by texture today.

Is it still an imprint, a skin, or more of an active behaviour?

How does the sensory experience translate when the texture can only be perceived digitally, not touched?

These issues open up a constantly evolving area of research, where code, real-time processing, and expanded perception challenge traditional categories and require a new sensory vocabulary.

In my own experiences with generative systems, texture is no longer a visual representation and instead becomes a dialogue between control and drift, a conversation between what I imagine and what the code chooses to display.

If we examine texture across three distinct eras: classical, contemporary, and today’s digital art, certain features demonstrate both continuity and change.

In traditional impasto techniques, with Tàpies as the key example, texture is a direct and bodily imprint of the gesture: a physical layer that conveys history, memory and affection. Accident and roughness emerge from tangible hand-material contact, transforming the surface into a fabric full of meaningful irregularities.

Contemporary matter painting, spanning from the late 20th century to the present, introduces mixed materials and hybrid processes that expand the traditional concept. Texture is no longer simply matter: it can be synthetic, organic or even conceptual.

Artists like Anselm Kiefer or Anish Kapoor explore that ambiguity in which the tactile coexists with the symbolic, expanding the sensory and conceptual experience. These works pave the way for a new type of matter: one that is not touched but perceived.

Real-time digital texture operates on a different plane: here, texture is processual, alive, and changeable, generated by codes and algorithms that create autonomous patterns, noises and gestures. Texture becomes a temporary and performative phenomenon that evolves over time and interaction, expanding perception into an audiovisual and multisensory experience where skin turns into a field of infinite data and possibilities.

In these works, the viewer’s body does not vanish: it becomes a sensor, a receiver of a vibration that is no longer in the matter, but in the flow.

This journey demonstrates that texture is not merely a visual effect or material issue, but a dynamic language that is reconfigured according to the tools, technologies and contexts involved.

At the same time, it prompts us to reflect on how experiencing textures has evolved from physical contemplation to digital immersion, raising questions about continuity, transformation, and emerging forms of sensitivity.

Non-static digital textures represent a significant shift in our visual experience. They are no longer fixed surfaces but instead a dynamic process that unfolds in real time. In live visuals, live cinema, or audiovisual performances, texture becomes an event that breathes and evolves in the eyes of artists and viewers.

Artists like Ryoichi Kurokawa and Joanie Lemercier have delved into this expanded state, where light acts as malleable matter and texture becomes an ephemeral architecture of time. These processes are marked by the interaction of variables such as controlled chance, feedback and noise, which create an algorithmic organicity.

Unlike in a material physical accident, where error is unexpected, in digital textures, chance is embedded in generational systems designed to respond, mutate, and cocreate with each execution. This endows the texture with an unpredictable, unique, and ephemeral character.

In this perspective, chance is no longer an adversary of control but transforms into a poetic tool: a strategy for contemplating time and sensitivity amid uncertainty. Therefore, in this experience, texture also becomes a multisensory phenomenon.

Visual perception is intertwined with sound and gesture, creating a synesthetic atmosphere in which the viewer not only looks but also hears a live frame fluctuating. Digital texture unfolds as a performative, active and open language, inviting expanded listening beyond mere vision.

This “visual listening” is the foundation of many contemporary audiovisual practices, such as VJing and performance, in which hearing and seeing are fused into a single tactile perception of the image.

This new paradigm challenges the traditional idea of finished work, emphasising the event and the open equation. Texture becomes an active form of thought. Many artists have expanded the traditional concept of texture into new digital dimensions. Within the Matter Painting movement, Tàpies remains a key figure for his focus on density, chance, and gesture memory.

In the digital universe, Zach Lieberman creates vibrating and pulsating lines (evoking the manual stroke, but without physical anchoring); texture is simply movement and visual choreography.

Manolo Gamboa Naon, for his part, deploys grain and stain constellations, an orderly chaos that spans from the natural to the electronic.

Other creators, like Quayola and Nicolas Sassoon, operate at the boundary between gesture and algorithm, transforming the pictorial into light patterns that maintain a near-touch vibration.

A particularly relevant case in today’s scene is that of French artist William Mapan, who represents a rich synthesis between the material-textural tradition and the languages of the code. In projects such as Dragons and Anticyclone, Mapan utilises generative algorithms to create works with a visual density that evokes pictorial matter. The digital surface assumes a submerged materiality, where noise and modulation algorithms generate landscapes that, although originating in code, retain an atmospheric and tactile resonance akin to oil or printmaking.

Mapan considers chance, error, and surprise as creative forces, bringing the digital texture closer to the tangible and the imperceptible. His works demonstrate that texture remains a domain of sensory exploration in generative art, advancing the question of the image’s skin and the emotion it evokes.

If the error is sublimated in Mapan, in other artists it becomes expressive matter.

The field of glitch and the aesthetics of error have become central in the contemporary debate on digital texture. Artist and theorist Rosa Menkman stands out for her dual focus, blending visual work with critical reflection in The Glitch Moment(um). Menkman views the glitch not as a failure, but as a “wonderful disruption” that opens new possibilities for meaning and experience. Her work exposes the inner architecture of code and functions as new textures of electronic communication.

In this context, Phillip Stearns and Sabato Visconti transpose the glitch into textile or photographic prints, reintroducing the matter into digital distortion: a kind of “tactile return” of error.

Aligned with this poetics of error, Andrew Benson (Pixlpa) specializes in generating textures through shaders and digital distortions.

Benson works with real-time images, creating surfaces that fluctuate and disintegrate, encouraging reflection on the fragility of the visual sign and the changing nature of the digital.

His work can be regarded as an archaeology of the pixel: each glitch is a temporal layer, a vibration that reveals the machine’s inner pulse.

In the performative and experimental fields, Portuguese artist Pedro Maia is a vital bridge between the material and the digital. Drawing on 16mm and 8mm cinema, Maia manipulates and scans physical-analogue materials to create visuals that resemble organic textures in continuous transformation. His work extends the plastic inheritance of celluloid into a hybrid space where material, technology, and sound converge. Maia has exhibited his pieces at renowned international festivals and museums, collaborating with musicians and plastic artists on high-resonance collective projects. In his performances, texture is time revealed: a memory in motion.

In addition, artists such as Casey Reas and Maotik explore texture as an algorithmic structure and as an immersive data space, respectively, expanding the visual vocabulary towards the biomorphic and the extended sensory.

In both cases, the texture is perceived as a wrapping rather than a surface.

Additionally, recent projects by Anna Carreras demonstrate how digital texture can function as an autonomous ecosystem, with each pixel possessing its own vital pulse. In Carreras’s work, programming transforms into a near-botanical process: the code germinates, grows, and branches like a living organism. Her generative systems embody a shared sensitivity between the organic and the digital, where texture becomes behaviour.

These referents show how texture in digital art is developed from various sources: random intervention, technical knowledge, aesthetic pursuit, and a willingness to broaden the sensory experience.

They are quintessential examples of ongoing dialogue between matter and pixel in contemporary art.

One of the significant advancements in digital texture is its connection with time.

Unlike the tangible surface, which is fixed and remains, the algorithm-generated texture occurs in the present: it unfolds as an event. The code enables us to model flows that incorporate randomness, feedback, and external variables, breaking the linearity of the classical process.

In live audiovisual practice, this temporality becomes language: each execution is an unrepeatable variation, a dialogue between intention and accident.

This temporary character transforms the visual experience: what we see is never fixed but instead evolves, changes, and fluctuates through contact with other processes (sound, movement, audience intervention, data sources…). The performative becomes a key component; texture emerges from an open choreography where images breathe and control is only partial.

If Tàpies permitted the matter to speak, today we let the code breathe.

Thus, the perception of texture is expanded, overflowing the physical plane: the audiovisual acquires sensory depth, inviting to a visual listening, to a haptic gaze, to a soft immersion between noise, chance and algorithm.

Possibilities extend to imagining texture not only as a surface but also as a field of forces: rhythm, pulse, vibration that links the matrix, the digital and the perceptual.

The question persists: what do we do now that the image’s skin is time, data, and behaviour?

How can we learn to perceive these new languages at the intersection of matter, code, and sensory perception?

At this point, texture functions as a language that spans eras, subjects and technologies. If it was originally a physical imprint and a material accident, today it encompasses behaviours, algorithmic processes, and sound experiences. The digital texture does not imitate matter – it introduces new ways of being in time, space and perception.

This shift prompts us to ask: what sensibility must we develop to “listen” to the digital texture, recognizing its poetics of error, chance, and interaction?

What role do feedback, real-time response, and the body (whether present or absent) play in developing an experimental visual language?

Beyond closed responses, this article aims to leave open questions for future investigation.

• How should we train our gaze and hearing for these phenomena?
• Can the digital texture restore something fundamental about the art experience: that felt connection between expectation, surprise, and meaning?
• Has the code become the new matter, or does the matter sprout in the code as a longing for a vanished physicality?

Perhaps the digital texture does not distance us from matter but rather restores its breath: a vibration between the visible and the inaudible, between the memory of the gesture and the present of the pixel.

Inhabiting that threshold where chance becomes language and code turns into living matter may be the new way to experience the image.

Recommended citation: VERDE, Marta. Real-time texture: from matter to pixel as sensory and performative language. Mosaic [online], November 2025, no. 205. ISSN: 1696-3296. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7238/m.n205.2512