…the error condemned today will sooner or later find itself in the treasure houses of discovery.

Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time

 

 

It is fairly agreed in the field of media arts that the aesthetics of interactive media are articulated to the event. But just what do we mean by the term event? And how do we come to understand the error that is emergent within this event? In this paper I attempt to provide some possible answers to these questions by investigating the manner in which interactive media art systems may become errant. When the productive interrelationships formed between human and machine systems seek the unforeseen and the emergent there is also a possibility for the unforeseen error to slip into existence. This occasion of interrelationship is an event, in which is enfolded the potential for error.

If time were laid out on a timeline, with one earlier event directing a later event then the emergence of an error, in this neat system of cause and effect, would be relatively predictable. We could see that when A occurs it produces B – the error. But this is not the way time is, and it is not the way events exist either in our day to day lives or in interaction with a digital system. Events exist, as A.N. Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze tell us, as complexes of occasions, all enfolded in the one event, not as a neatly linear sequence of compartmentalised occasions. B is thus enfolded in A, for B –the error – to be brought into existence it must be unfolded from A (Whitehead The Concept of Nature 75). Here I take my starting point from Whitehead's process philosophy and Deleuze's philosophy of the virtual. These philosophers provide us with a means to understand the event, and, by extrapolating from these thinkers, a means to understand the event of the digital encounter. Once we understand the event through this framework we can begin to examine the place of errors in this system.

Deleuze answers the question "What is an event?" in a short chapter in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, one of the few times that he mentions Whitehead. In this chapter Deleuze, aligns himself with Whitehead's thought in order to think the event in relation to his own work on the fold (Deleuze 76-82). He credits Whitehead as the philosopher who importantly situated the event as the central constitutive element of reality. The connection between the way in which Deleuze uses the event and Whitehead's initial categorisation and explanation of the scheme has been cited previously by theorists such as Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine, as well as Steve Shaviro and Tim Clark (Prigogine and Stengers 387-89; Stengers; Shaviro; Clark). For all these thinkers, although there are no one to one correspondences between Whitehead's and Deleuze's thought, Whitehead and Deleuze's ideas work together to produce a mode of thought which takes the virtual elements of the event and the notions of permanence and flux within and between multiplicities as its theoretical ground. In this paper I situate the event of interactive media art within this theoretical framework and attempt to conceptualise the error as the actualisation of unforeseen potential within this system of flux.

Paul Patton's work on elucidating the Deleuzian event is useful here. Patton points out that Deleuze takes his concept of an event from the Stoics. He points out that the Stoics drew a fundamental distinction between two realms of being, a material realm of bodies and states of affairs, referred to as actual,  and an incorporeal realm of events, referred to as the virtual (Patton). For Patton, the Deleuzian events are the "epiphenomena" of corporeal causal interactions: they do not affect bodies and states of affairs but they do affect other events, such as the responses and actions of agents. In other words events are the incorporeal attributes of material bodies. Patton gives the example of being cut with a knife. The fact of 'being cut' is neither a property of the flesh nor of the knife, it is rather, as Patton puts it, an attribute or the "interpenetration of bodies" (Patton). Following this, it may be possible that the fact of 'being errant' is neither a property of the human nor of the machine but rather an attribute of the condition of their interrelationship. The human and the machine interpenetrate one another in order to affect the state of the error, to bring the error into existence.

In relation to media art an event can be understood as the multifarious occasions that manifest the digital encounter. This includes both the aesthetics of the interface, the coded regime of the database and the software, the materiality of interaction, and also importantly the potential for error. As Adrian Mackenzie has already pointed out in his book Cutting Code, any contemplation of the reception of the image of the interface must also consider the aesthetics of the machine and its particular software (Mackenzie). The media event and its aesthetic are thus articulated not just to the image of the interface but also to the digitality of the system, including the work's software, machinic and computational processes and interactivity. In all the occasions that are manifest by these later agents in the digital encounter the condition for error is immanent.

For Deleuze, as for Whitehead, events are marked by the condition of extension, as "…one element (is) stretched over the following ones" (Deleuze 77). The duration of actual occasions have jagged boundaries, the end of one and the beginning of another are never clear cut, rather they extend over one another (Whitehead The Concept of Nature 50-55). In other words, events are the forming of nexūs, prehension, or the exchange of information between one actual entity and another, in short, the event is marked by hybridization and concrescence. The event is the process by which the virtual is actualised and this event comes into being through the becoming of Whiteheadian actual occasions (Hosinski 21). These occasions extend over every other occasion, thus containing traces of all the other occasions that have been brought into being. Everything contains everything else (Whitehead Modes of Thought 225). Thus, the Whiteheadian occasions contain a turbulence of every other occasion and within this turbulence of occasions is also the error. The duration of an event is thus thick with a complex of other incorporeal events, any one of these which may actualise an error.

As Steven Shaviro states in his commentary on Whitehead, "the world…is made of events, and nothing but events: happenings rather than things, verbs rather than nouns, processes rather than substances"(Shaviro 1). For Whitehead, everything in reality, including those things that have the appearance of continuity through time, are made up of a multiplicity of events (Whitehead Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology 29). All the world is thus in a constant state of becoming as all the world is constituted by the remaking of actual entities at every instant in time. As Whitehead states as his first  category of explanation, "the actual world is a process…the process is the becoming of actual entities" (Whitehead Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology 22). For Whitehead, events, not substances, constitute the world. An event is not something that happens to someone but rather something that happens with or in them (Williams). In terms of error, when thinking it through the philosophy of the event, the error happens with the user and with the machine, it happens in the event of their interrelationship.

As occasions, or Whiteheadian actual entities, extend over one another the error extends over the user. In this sense the user is invested in the errant system and thus a part of the condition for error. This can be seen for instance in Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw, Neil Brown and Peter Weibel's astounding work T_Visionarium II (see (http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/prj_tvis_II.html). This work, set within the purpose built Advanced Visualisation and Audification Environment (AVIE), a 360 degree immersive environment, opens a large database of television clips to recombinatory searches. The participant of T_Visionarium II is subject to the constant clustering, un-clustering and re-clustering of images. Upon entering AVIE, the user puts on stereoscopic glasses and interacts with the machine via a hand held interface. In the 360 degree space the user is surrounded by a multitude of looping television clips. Selecting one of these clips causes other clips to be triggered from the database and clustered around this image in a hierarchy of relationality.

In this work the participant strives for the control that the machine refuses to give. The user makes selections and images re-cluster, appearing, due to the stereoscopic glasses to fly through the three dimensional space of the installation, accompanied by their soundtracks. But the images assign themselves into clusters that are unforeseen by the user. There is virtually no way to predict the images that any specific selection will trigger. In this way, T_Visionarium II facilitates a negotiation between the human and the machine, with one responding to the other; rather than a model of interaction that centres upon human control. The human thus gives themselves over to the machine, and in doing so gives themselves over to the condition for error.

This error manifests, quite unintentionally, as occasionally T_Visionarium II triggers images that seemingly have a negligible affinity to the image selected. The system could be programmed, for instance, to search for colour-value and trigger a scene with a negligible colour affinity to the source image. This is due to a technological limitation, a fault in the system or a technological bug. But this is not necessarily an aesthetic bug or something that impoverishes the experience of the work. This fault in the system is brought about due to the problematic nature of attempting to describe the static colour of a moving image. The system selects one frame of the forty-eight frames per second in the two second loop and bases the scene's colour on this static section of movement. So, if a body was standing in front of the camera in the first frame of a forty-eight frame sequence but then had moved away by the third or fourth frame to reveal a predominately light coloured scene, the system would incorrectly read the colour as black. The system becomes errant in that it does not actualise what we as users would expect. Seemingly, the subsequent cluster of dark images around light images would be faulty. But this would only be faulty if the work were a tool and not a work of art. This faulty cluster leads to questions as to the machine’s judgement and also questions of reception and recognition. The machine is making mistakes, the machine is triggering images from its memory that are seemingly disconnected; the machine is actualising errors from the potential that exists in the field of the virtual. The limitations of the work's search facility are embodied into the content of the work and the experience of the user. The error does not happen to the work or to the user. It rather happens with the work and with the user. The error extends over the user; they are invested in the error that is actualised by the event of the digital encounter.

In order to further understand the event and the way in which an error may slip into existence we may turn to Deleuze's philosophy of the virtual. This philosophy is not a philosophy of events that actually take place. Rather it is a philosophy of events that could have potentially taken place if things had been different. As DeLanda points out in his commentary on Deleuze, studying the virtual is not an investigation of the events that actually occurred in a system, but rather understanding the system based on the events that could have potentially taken place, if certain circumstances had been different (DeLanda 35). The virtual is the field of potential, the event is the becoming actual of the virtual; it is the actualisation of one event from the multiplicity of the virtual. The virtual that Deleuze theorises is a mode of reality that is articulated in the emergence of new potentials; the virtual is implicated in the reality of change (Massumi). So, in this framework, we can think of the error as the potential that may or may not come into existence. The system that seeks the actualisation of unforeseen potential is thus also a system that has the capacity to become errant. We can think of any system that is open to the unforeseen as surrounded by a cloud of potential errors, or, as Deleuze would put it, a cloud of the virtual (Deleuze and Parnet 148). In other words, at any moment, any system that seeks the unforeseen, the novel or the new is involved in the process of actualising potential information. At any moment this system is traversing a field of potential. Within this field exists the virtual error, waiting to be actualised by an errant system. At any point in its process, a system is traversing potential errors and at any point, one may become actualised.

As a system attempts to actualise this unformed information, to form the unformed from the cloud of the virtual, the system may also give form to an unformed error. Rather than thinking of an event as the process by which preformed or preconceived possible information becomes realised, we can only think of an error as coming into being as the unformed and the unforeseen potential is actualised. This potential emerges from unique activities that occur in the process of a system. These unique activities open the system so that unforeseen information may emerge (DeLanda 36-37). If a system runs through its process without the potential for error it is essentially closed. It does not allow the potentiality of the emergent or the unforeseen. It is only through allowing the capacity for potential errors that we may provide the opportunity to think the unthought, to become-other, and to hence initiate further unforeseen becomings in the virtual (Rodowick 201). In a sense, when there is potential for an error to emerge in a system, the system cannot be regarded as a pre-formed linear progress, rather it can only be thought as a divergent process that actualises elements of the virtual.  

Kim Gascone has previously pointed to the artists that exploit this potential for error in order to create what he calls a 'glitch aesthetic'. Artists such as the composer Ryoji Ikeda, (http://www.ryojiikeda.com/) who create compositions that exploit the inadequacies of the medium, use errors as generative tools. In these instances, artists set up situations in which errors are able to emerge and be exploited in the art making process. In these types of work the artist’s role is to allow a glitch or an error to arise in a specific system, then to reconfigure and exploit the generative qualities of the unforeseen error. This type of practice is also taken up in the visual arts by Artists such as Tony Scott (http://www.beflix.com/works/glitch.php) who set up situations in which errors are able to emerge and be exploited in the art making process. In these types of work the artist’s role is to allow a glitch or an error to arise in a specific system, then to reconfigure and exploit the generative qualities of the unforeseen error.

Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, who together make up Jodi, produce internet based works in which the user's computer seems to be actualising errors at every instant of interaction. For instance, in 404.jodi.org it is as if the user and their computer are stuck in a looping error. What emerges from interaction here is not that which is expected or at all controlled by the user. The user may interact with this work, sending an email response, but this information is passed through a filter which reduces the message to gibberish. This filtering renders the system unusable, in the traditional HCI sense. In this work the user is unable to exploit the system; the system does not work for the user. Instead errors are continually unfolded from a system. Jodi's formalist investigation of the digital medium here exploits the limitations of the digital network and the errors that are enfolded in the system.

The generative capabilities of error can be understood through Lev Manovich’s cultural communication model developed in his paper “Post-Media Aesthetics”. Traditionally, a pre-media cultural communication model represents the transmission of a signal as SENDER—MESSAGE—RECEIVER (Manovich "Post-Media Aesthetics" 18). In this original model the sender encodes and transmits a message over a communication channel; as Manovich indicates, in the course of transmission the message is affected by any noise that is existent along the communication channel. The receiver then decodes the message. Here the message is susceptible to error in two ways. First, the noise that originates from the communication channel may alter the message, second, their may be discrepancies between the sender and receiver’s code (Manovich "Post-Media Aesthetics" 18).  Manovich, in order to propose a post-digital consideration of transmission, has developed this model by including the sender's and receiver’s software. Post-digital cultural communication can now be considered as SENDER—SOFTWARE—MESSAGE—SOFTWARE—RECEIVER (Manovich "Post-Media Aesthetics" 17-18). In this model the cultural significance of software is emphasised. The software, much more than the noise introduced by the communication channel, may change the message. Significantly, the software may introduce an error into the message. Following Deleuze, we may say that the software may articulate a link to the field of potential in order to generate unforeseen, and perhaps unwanted, information.

The cultural role that Manovich ascribes to software becomes elucidated in Dimtre Lima and Iman Morandi’s Glitchbrowser (http://www.glitchbrowser.com). Glitchbrowser is an alternative to the traditional model of a web browser. This browser, rather than attempting to assist user navigation of the internet, creates errors when displaying the pages that it accesses. The images of any page accessed by Glitchbrowser are distorted or glitched through colour saturation and abstraction from their original composition. In this work, following Manovich’s cultural communication model, the software that intervenes between sender and receiver alters the content of the message. Thus in Glitchbrowser, the artists remind us that the information we receive is largely reconstituted by the system it travels through. In a sense the machine reveals itself, rather than creating the illusion of a transparent interface to information. In the application of Glitchbrowser the user witnesses the way that messages are transmitted and altered by the interface. The machine, at every instant of interaction, reminds the user of its existence (Manovich The Language of New Media 206).

There is a kind of Duchampian legacy, to borrow David Hopkin's term, emergent in the aesthetics of the error. Hopkins traces a legacy from Marcel Duchamp, through Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Jasper Johns and Ed Keinholz that positions art as a dematerialised concept that awaits actualisation by a spectator (Hopkins 41). To continue this pursuit we could situate the error or glitch aesthetic inside this paradigm. We can think of artworks that allow the potential for error as similar to those artists that Hopkins situates within the Duchampian paradigm. We can certainly think of the error in a system in the same manner as artists such as Jean Arp think of chance as a creative tool. Just as works such as Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance exploit the chance event as a creative force and hence move into the realm of the potential, works such as Jodi's, Scott's and Lima and Morandi's move into the unforeseen as errors direct the aesthetic. Also, we can see similarities between the art of the error and Rauschenberg’s White Paintings. These works, following Hopkins, are “passive receptors, awaiting events rather than prescribing sensations” (Hopkins 42). The works exist, not as art objects in themselves, but await an audience to initiate their transformation into art. The works exist as empty spaces that are to be filled by the audience and all those peripheral events that occur around them. Art is not inside the White Paintings, but rather outside them. Works such as Rauschenberg’s, or Cage's 4’33”, similarly to the art of the error, exists as open potentiality. In these works, both the artist and the audience find themselves in the field of the emergent. The artist must provide the condition for the emergent and unforeseen and the audience must bring this condition to satisfaction. The work is not just constituted by the machine and its substrate but also by the way the human responds to the immersive environment. The work no longer takes place in a time and space that is separate from the spectator. Rather the time and space of the spectator and the time and space of the machine are both implicit in the realisation of the work.

 

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