[spectre] Darko Fritz: exhibition Internet Error Messages . GMSU Vela Luka

[Darko Fritz]

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.