You are cordially invited to an opening of the exhibition
Internet Error Messagess
by Darko Fritz
on Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 9 p. m.
in the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art
in the Cultural Center of Vela Luka
Internet Error Messages: http://darkofritz.net/projects/HTMLerror.htm
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Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art
in Cultural Centre of Vela Luka
Obala 3/9 . 20270 Vela Luka . Croatia
tel: + 385. 20 . 813602
open: 9 - 14h, 18 - 20 h . Saturday 10 - 12 h
free entrance
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Vesna Madzoski
Error to Mistake > Notes on the Aesthetics of Failure
TYPES OF FAILURE AS DEFINED BY www.institute-of-failure.comACCIDENT/
MISTAKE/ WEAKNESS/ INABILITY/ INCORRECT METHOD/ USELESSNESS/
INCOMPATIBILITY/ EMBARRASSMENT/ CON-FUSION/ REDUNDANCY/ OBSOLESCENCE/
INCOHERENCE/ UNRECOGNIZABILITY/ ABSURDITY/ INVISIBILITY/ IMPERMANENCE/
DE-CAY/ INSTABILITY/ FORGETABILITY/ TARDINESS/ DISAPPEARANCE/
CATASTROPHE/ UNCERTAINTY/ DOUBT/ FEAR/ DISTRACTIBILITY
Vesna MadžoskiError to Mistake > Notes on the Aesthetics of Failure
“One day in the near future anthologies of 20th century inter-office
memos might be as treasured asthe correspondence of Virginia Woolf and
T. S. Eliot.”J. G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996)
Two dominant scenarios of the future of humanity have marked the
(post)modern century behind us. According to the first, optimi-tic
one, we will reach unimaginable evolutionary peaks due to
technological perfection; this disciplined and orderly functioning of
machines will bring humans to the final state of evolutionwhere the
body never leaves the coziness of the pre-natal state of fullness and
happiness. The other scenario gives a more concerned view on the
technological advancement and supremacy, haunted with the images of
Earth’s exhausted natural resources that will put humans a few
evolutionary steps back – to their animal, ‘pre-civi-lized’ state.
Although completely different when it comes to the final consequences
on humanit, those two phantasms entail one thing in common – the
impossibility to disconnect present-day humans from their evolutionary
new technological environment, an environment that should bring them
to the final resurrection or to the final end.
Technology and machines are not created ex nihilo; they are the
children of imperfect humanity. Human obsession with machines hides
the desire to create all we are not – perfect, flawless and
eternal.This race to create mechanical-beings-we’ll-never-be has been
used as a tool in inter-national political fights for dominance many
times in the past. Nevertheless, as Slavoj Zizek hasnoticed, the cold
war between the USA and USSR became unnecessary when it came to the
creation and perfection of super-com-puters. According to him, this is
primarily because computers entail a permanent lack, a permanent
mistake in their own essence that will provide enough room for future
more developed and more perfect models. This immanent imperfection of
a brain-machine became its structural condition that guarantees its
development and future.
Nevertheless, humanity wants to stay blind and deaf for this and
chooses to believe in the perfection of machines, being surprised
every time when the system shows its totalities and mistakes. Darko
Fritz’s series of works entitled Internet Error Messages takes for its
subject those glitches, delays and crashes, cracks and gaps in the
‘perfect’ system of technology-based everyday life at the beginning of
the 21st century. Fritz decides to displace those functional messages
out of their ‘natural’ technological environment and questions their
real function. In the original environment, those messages have the
function of showing us the possibility of the system to communicate
with us, delivering messages about its internal processes. Through the
selection of particular messages, Fritz decides to pinpoint the
emptiness of the global digital database (204 NO CONTENT, 404 FILE NOT
FOUND), the exhaustion of its resources (503 OUT OF RESOURCES), the
hidden rules according to which the system accepts or rejects our
actions (406 NOT ACCEPTABLE), the existence of different systems and
their structural incompatibility (405 UNSUPPORTED MEDIA TYPE), as well
as invisible trajectories and movements within the system itself (302
MOVED TEMPORARILY).
Through those actions of decontextualization of system messages, Fritz
erases the illusion of their functionality; he turns them into what
they actually are – ornamental screens whose purpose is to hide the
holes in the system. Fritz decides to take them ‘out’ and put them
back in an ‘unnatural’ natural environment, using land and flowers to
replace pixels and electronic signals.Their new form is ephemeral; it
lasts until the organic matter lives, showing us the ‘true’ transient
order of things as juxtaposed to the promised eternity of the
technological universe. They become a part of the landscape, assembled
for the gaze coming from above, forcing us to re-examine our godly
position in creating and managing the usual environment of machines.
In his decision to use both analogue and digital machines and systems,
Fritz wants to establish a connection between the two, testing their
ability to communicate with each other but at the same time showing us
the speed of change and the abandonment of technical tools in just a
matter of months. Fax messages were a dominant way of communication
just a decade ago. Today, they already function as tombstones of
previous times, allowing us to perceive their aesthetics not any more
as functional but as purely visual pleasure. In his actions of sending
fax messages to different art institutions (series of works entitled
Fax.nl), Fritz not only underlines this, but he also tests the art
system and the way it defines and recognizes works of art. The failure
to recognize them as such means their erasure from the dominant
narrative of art history and their exchange value becomes zero. This
way, it becomes clear that the system is not an entity that exists by
itself; it depends on and is made out of the human beings who have the
power and agency to accept or reject things as art or something that
is not.
Those visual expressions that I dare to name the aesthetics of failure
function as a constant reminder that things might and do go wrong, and
the failure of a machine to fulfill its promises of bringing us
perfection and eternal happiness becomes the conditionof its actual
existence. Stripping them off of their functionality, Fritz shows the
lacks those messages try to hide, warning us of the ongoing processes
in highly bureaucratized present-day societies to transfer all
decision-making to machines as being dangerous in its essence. The
distribution of power to a machine that makes mistakes and has no
empathy with the smashed human being on the other side belongs more to
the other, pessimistic scenario of the future. The possibility to
become a statistical error needed for the functioning of every system
does not sound comforting at all. As the lucid quote from the
beginning of this text reveals, it seems that the fax and email
messages we exchange today might be the way for some future
generations (in the optimistic scenario) to decipher the essence of
our existence. And Fritz’s work shows that this cannot be done without
acknowledging the ones considered to be mistakes – empty, blank spaces
in the technological memory.
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