đŸ”¶ đŸ”· notes ACCIDENTAL TECHNOLOGY notes 🔘 🔳 * [proposed working title:] *Accidental technologies and/in art practice *[or:] arts and accidental technology *## astigmatic prologue Several opposing lenses exist through which to view accidental technologies in the arts: *### lens 1: aestheticization Ever since the Western Enlightenment episteme divided the Latin "ars" - and its Greek predecessor "technē" - into the separate domains of "art," "science," "technology," "craft," and "skill," investigations of art as accidental technical invention have been doomed to be either romantic or moot. While "art" in its contemporary meaning provided a refuge for non-empirical, speculative, and even irrational practices and knowledge, it also quarantined them into the domain of the aesthetic. Accidental, random, absurdist, pataphysical and haunted technologies were effectively sanitized in this way. Athanasius Kircher's speculative contraptions, for example, were still part of mainstream science and technology in the 17th century.^[When (Hocke) and others call these devices and sciences "mannerist," they are employing a modernist perspective and framing. In their time, Kircher's books were considered part of humanistic science and scholarship]. Some of them, such as the kaleidoscope and the spy eye, even became common devices in the centuries that followed. Most of the objects, devices, and technologies (including social technologies such as psychogeography, durational performance, deep listening, nongkrong) that were created more or less accidentally by artists in the 20th and 21st centuries, existed outside of established science and technology.^[Psychogeography—roaming in cities and other environments—was central to the anti-functionalist 'unitary urbanism' of the Situationist International from the 1950s to the 1970s; durational performance became a common practice in the body and performance art of the early 1970s (among others, by Ulay and Marina Abramovic), Deep Listening was first developed by composer and musician Pauline Oliveros as a mindful way of listening, Nongkrong (Indonesian) roughly translates as chit-chatting and aimlessly hanging out in a group of people and was a working principle of Indonesian artist collectives and of documenta fifteen, Kassel, in 2022]). *### lens 2: design prototyping From 1965 to 1975, Japanese Fluxus artist Mieko Shiomi created a series of nine "Spatial Poems" that consisted of prompts for simple actions like the following: > SPATIAL POEM no. 3 will be the record of your intentional effort to make something fall, occurring as it would, simultaneously with all the countless and incessant falling events. > Please write to me how and when you performed it, as we are going to edit them chronologically These instructions were sent to Shiomi's network of friends and fellow artists. Shiomi compiled their responses - that is, the executed prompt - and assembled them into poem objects. With this work, Shiomi is often credited with having co-initiated Mail Art. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mail Art developed into a global communication ecosystem that called itself "The Eternal Network" according to a coinage by Fluxus artist Robert Filliou. The extent to which it anticipated the internet and its social networks in the medium of postal mail can be seen in a 1983 diagram by the Italian mail artist Vittore Baroni, which is effectively a schematic of a distributed peer-to-peer network architecture: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/10/e1/27/10e127f3850d4e8b3f70451871fb191d.jpg For comparison, this is an often-used diagram visualizing today's digital network architectures:^[This diagram exists in so many variants that it was impossible to trace its historical origin.] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jason-Hoelscher/publication/260480880/figure/fig1/AS:297257619476480@1447883147178/Centralized-decentralized-and-distributed-network-models-by-Paul-Baran-1964-part-of-a.png From today's perspective, Shiomi's "Spatial Poems" also constituted a small data operation: networked data mining, mapping, and data visualization. Moreover, there is a striking similarity between Shiomi's prompts and minimalism with a social medium that was wildly popular at the time this essay was written (to the point of being considered the defining audiovisual and social medium of today's young generation): the Chinese website æŠ–éŸł/TikTok, which consists of very short (usually 10-15 second) videos, most of which were recorded by TikTok users themselves with their mobile phones. TikTok became known for viral "challenges" in which certain dance moves or (sometimes dangerous) stunts had to be performed in front of the camera. In retrospect, one could call Shiomi's Spatial Poems a perfect pre-Internet TikTok prototype. Other such lines of connection from experimental arts to mainstream technology could be drawn, of which Fluxus alone provides many examples, such as the prototype of the 1980s and 1990s MTV music video in Nam June Paik's video art (especially in his 1973 piece "Global Groove") and the prototyping of co-working spaces in George Maciunas' Fluxhouse cooperatives (1967) - which also initiated the transformation of New York's SoHo neighborhood and thus made an originally communist 'kolkhoz' project the historical blueprint of "creative class" gentrification. Other examples of technologies prototyped in art include tile mosaics as precursors to pixel graphics (including the Bayer filter technology used for digital photography and videography); the invention of wireless frequency hopping, modeled on player pianos, by actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil in 1941 in support of the U.S. Army in World War II; the proposal of electronic libraries in El Lissitzky's 1926 manifesto *Our Book*; the anticipation of AI text prompt image generators in Dadaist collage, photomontage and in Cornelia Sollfrank's 1999 *net. art generators*, a work that involved complex considerations of authorship and the copyright implications of algorithms; the origins of (vacation rental platform) Airbnb as a social design project developed by design students; the preemption of Instagram self-fashioning in Cindy Sherman's staged photographic self-portraits of the 1980s; and of internet memes in the visual works of John Heartfield and Barbara Kruger. In this lens, the (relative) autonomy of art, or its (limited) license to speculate and experiment, allows it to develop the most imaginative prototypes of what may one day become mainstream technology. This capitalist-realist scenario would also provide an answer to the relationship between accident and technology: that these accidents are actually supposed happen in the arts, rather than in any other domain including technological design and engineering, since the arts - wherever they lost their traditional functions of mimesis and representation - operate as a socially, politically and economically sanctioned niche and playground for speculative work and thinking. *### lens 3: accidental scientific and technological invention This (ultimately romantic) understanding of the arts seems, however, to be contradicted by two facts: planned technological invention in the arts, and accidental technological discovers in science and engineering. While artistic research practices such as pataphysics, psychogeography, and nonkrong elevate accident to a program, there are also counterexamples of art modeled on military and industrial invention, such as Italian Futurism, the case of Lamarr and Antheil, highly institutionalized forms of research laboratory art, as well as the very notion of "avant-garde." These examples simultaneously illustrate the fuzziness of such apparent oppositions. Italian futurism, though modeled on the military, was highly speculative and experimental, with today's non-European futurisms-Afrofuturism and Sinofuturism-taking speculation even further. Conversely, the invention of many technologies through scientists and engineers did not follow a program or plan, but was accidental: * X-rays were discovered accidentally by Wilhelm Röntgen when he was testing whether cathode rays could penetrate glass; * Pennicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming, who found that a mold had accidentally killed bacterial cultures in his hospital laboratory; * vulcanized rubber was discovered by Charles Goodyear, who accidentally dropped rubber mixed with sulfur onto a hot stove * microwaves as a heating technique were discovered by the engineer Percy Spencer, who found that a magnetron had caused his snack to melt; * the pacemaker was invented by engineer Wilson Greatbatch, who really just wanted to record the rhythm of the heartbeat; * Sildenafil/Viagra was originally developed by Pfizer to treat cardiovascular disease until test patients found it worked as a potency drug; * The safety pin was accidentally invented by Walter Hunt while he was playing around with wire; * The Arpanet/Internet was originally developed to more efficiently share the computational resources of time-sharing computers in research institutes, but shortly after its introduction, e-mail became its most popular function. In the above examples of accidental discovery in engineering and science, technological invention had always been the goal. It only resulted in purposes and products different from those originally intended. In the arts, on the other hand, one might assume that poetic inventions that happened to become technological visions - from Lissitzky's *Electron Library* to Shiomi's *Spatial Poem* and Sollfrank's *net.art generator* - were originally intended "only" as art projects and accidentally became prototypes of technologies. But this assumption only works if one narrows the scope of art and ignores that (especially in the examples from Dada, Fluxus, and cyberfeminist net.art) these art practices also saw themselves as real experiments with alternative life practices. Today, this ambition has not diminished, but has actually intensified in the arts when one thinks of contemporary multidisciplinary artist collectives in different world regions - such as those that participated in documenta fifteen in 2022 - whose art practice is practical community work and experimentation with more sustainable modes of living. If art thus becomes a human self-experimentation - and if this "self" is increasingly collectivized and extended to entire communities - how does it differ from martial inventions and biopolitical experiments, except in its political-economic power? All these examples show how difficult or even arbitrary the distinction between artistic practice and techno-social practice is, which brings us to an elephant in the room: the definition of technology. While the Oxford English Dictionary conventionally defines it as a "branch of knowledge concerned with the mechanical arts and applied sciences," cybernetics, general systems theory, media theory, and philosophers such as Gilbert Simondon have complicated its definition by taking it out of the nature/culture dichotomy and into more complex techno-social dynamics. When technology is conversely engineered as social design (as in most Internet platforms and long before that in architecture), it becomes difficult to draw the line between technology and other forms of _poeisis_: For example, is experimental community building a technology? Such as: squats, communes and experimental living communities in social and political activism, experimental platform and community building in hacker culture, residencies and collectives in contemporary art, and their various overlaps and intersections in utopian-dystopian projects such as Monte VeritĂ  in the early 20th century, the Otto Muehl commune in the 1970s, and the "lumbung ecosistem" of documenta fifteen in 2022,^["Lumbung" is the Indonesian equivalent of "commons".] as well as in occult, spiritualist and magical practices that often describe their ways of working as technology (among others: shamanism, meditation, communication with ghosts, practical kabbalah, and modern gnostic movements such as Scientology). *### lens 4: accidents in tool development It would be a simplification if one would generally and sweepingly credit art for accidental technologies. The opposite is also true. For example, science fiction literature has historically served as a direct inspiration for research and development, particularly in the field of digital technology and artificial intelligence. (Computer hackers and enginneers happen to be among the most avid readers and viewers of science fiction literature, films and tv.) Effectively, science fiction has often served as a master plan for a technology, as an elaborate, systematically developed blueprint. There's also non-accidental, hands-on technology development in the arts themselves: in research-oriented electronic and computer music where composition also encompasses the developm,ent of suitable hardware and software instruments, and in the development of community media tools, such in the 1970s video and democratic television activism of the artist collective Raindance Corporation, and today in the development of Open Source community tools in artist collectives such as Lifepatch, varia and Hackers & Designers. But what if one doesn't optimistically look at accidents in artists' technological _poiesis_, but at accidents in the sense of prosaic, or even catastrophic, failure? The Otto Muehl commune, which began as an social-artistic experiment and ended in criminal convicitions for systematic sexual abuse, might be the strongest example II. Networks, Art Movements, Mail Art (centralisation -> decentralised -> distributed) * New York Correspondance School (NYCS) as the historically first social network/social medium * the subsequent history of Mail Art anticipated many if not most contemporary issues of digital social media: moderation/filtering, trolling, spamming/junk mail, spreading of Alt Right ideologies under the guise of cultural transgressiveness/edginess, etc.etc. * Mail Art was a direct precursor to online social media via Mail Art electronic BBS systems in the 1980s and Mail Art boards on The Well (the electronic message/discussion board created by Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalogue publishing house in San Francisco, and whose historical account in Howard Rheingold's 1993 book The Virtual Community factually served as the blueprint for later large-scale social networks such as AOL, Friendster and Facebook) * The NYCS accidentally prototyped social media, because its orginal aim was not to create an alternative system of mass communication, but - from Ray Johnson in the 1960s to Vittore Baroni in the 1980s - a self-organized, non-hierarchical, inclusive alternative to the [museum/curatorial] art system. * Conversely, the fixation on art (including postal exchange of art works/artefacts) is what held Mail Art back or marginalized it, because it became a low-entry system for people who ultimately sought to have some sort of art career. * See (anarchist) Bob Black's comparison of Mail Art to Paralympics as opposed to the Olympics of the established art system: it is not a radically different or radically inclusive system, but only one that works with a different reward system (quantity/regularity/endurance of participation as opposed to quality of contributions); see also Craig A. Saper characterization of Mail Art as "intimate bureaucracies" (i.e. micro-bureaucracies of Mail Art participants acting as mail operators) -> Is this a link to Display Distribute? (Is Light Logistics an intimate bureaucracy?) vs. technological accidents: * * Microsoft's Tay bot and its (re)programming through 4chan's Alt-Right in 2016 => questioning of the cause-and-effect logic that either technologies create accidents or that accidents create technologies. Instead: The accident is the technology and vice versa; the two cannot be differentiated. -> Think of other "open artworks" (Eco) such as Tzara's cut-up Dadaist poem instruction or Shiomi's Spatial Poem and how easily could yield the same dynamic; 4chan itself being a perfect example of technology=accident. *### lens 5: aestheticized technology On the other hand, the example of TikTok illustrates how, since the Internet boom of the 1990s, technology itself has become aesthetic; perhaps even to the point where the distinction between art and technology blurs and the pre-modern notion of "ars" (or technē) makes a comeback. The programs of Fluxus and Situationism in the 1960s to replace fine art with "art-amusement" and "vaudeville art" (George Maciunas in the _Fluxmanifesto on Fluxamusement_, 1965) and functionalism with ludism (European Situationists referring to (Huizinga)) not only read as blueprints for "gamification" in contemporary creative industries. In some cases they are even literally cited as references. ^[Such as in Gaver, Bill, Tony Dunne, and Elena Pacenti. "Design: cultural probes." _interactions_ 6.1 (1999): 21-29.] The Situationist International anticipated this risk in its own concept of "recupĂ©ration" (hijacking). But few concepts and practices developed in speculative arts were so thoroughly hijacked as those of the Situationists, especially those of Ludic urbanism. Another question is whether such ideas did not already have their problematic dialectic the moment they were coined. *## DIY, Self-experimentation, raising meta-narratives In his essay "Infrastructures Work on Time", Timothy Mitchell introduces the challenge to consider delay and postponement as an alternative barometer by which to consider large-scale infrastructure projects, perhaps something akin to environmentalists' call for degrowth. This so-called reversal is what blushes the cringe-worthy tint of romanticism upon anyone and anything that is not on board with continued modernisation, yet the slowed time of which Mitchell speaks actually refers to both the material durability of built infrastructure like railroads and highways, as well as the durational temporality by which "the present extracts wealth from the future" via investment, credit, and accumulated interest.^[Timothy Mitchell, "Infrastructures Work on Time", *e-flux Architecture*, , accessed 19 December 2022.] As such, the waiting time of accrued revenue is just as much a desired variable of the mandates for growth, conquest, and development as any luddite's call to slow things down. The temporality of the accident, however, is not necessarily about slowing down or speeding up; it nestles within the gaps between past and future—rips in a planned timeline of the experiment which alter the trajectory of otherwise hypothesised futures. A French chemist clumsily knocks over a flask and inadvertently invents safety glass. World War I nurses appropriate particular cellulose bandages meant for wounded soldiers, unintentionally launching the disposable menstrual pad industry. Scientists answering to the US government's calls for synthetic rubber in light of shortages during World War II fail with a too malleable silicone polymer, which later goes on to become the classic children's fidget toy Silly Putty. The nature of 'accident' in these examples of great technologies which have revolutionised our world today are each tonally distinct. The ensuing invention may be the result of accident, but the manner by which they each came about varies—from literal mishap, to astute reappropriated use, to a failed experiment which begets a new commercially viable twist. By virtue of these diversions in the timeline, long, profitable futures are had by those who manage to grasp hold of the resources to control the technology and its production, and magically, what was an unforeseen glitch in the present becomes once again part of the mandate for development, efficiency, and predictable space-time. What we are interested in here, however, has perhaps less to do with such historically repeated conquests but the temporality of the unrepeatable—that which cannot be so readily scaled-up. For what sets the precedent of military and state with corporate handshakes is precisely the grip upon resources which turn accidents into products, the disenfranchised into the revitalised, and disuse into innovation. Scientific and technological accidents easily become managed uses of time, space and other resources because they often occur as fissures *within* institutional practice, therefore easily co-opted: Humvee becomes Hummer; chest pain medication becomes Viagra; eye treatment for cross-sightedness becomes Botox. For however much the mandate for 'originality' in art can be argued, to speak about accidents in art has more to do with the hope for uniqueness by which the art realm has been historically established (poeisis) [and which also makes up the difference between Shiomi's 'Spatial Poem' and TikTok]. The repeatable is traditionally undesireable, and this indirectly leads to a question about artists' relations to institutions, which mechanise and systematise production for stratified and repeatable forms of output and representation. In the case of both museums and funding organisations, administration monitors and manages the flow of resources from private and state sectors, setting sanctioned barometers for what art is and 'good artists' are in the eyes of the corporation and nation. In this sense, the wielding of resources occurs not so dissimilarly from the mass-industrial complex of which we spoke before, but if we are to try to cull again something with a bit more liberatory potential from art and the accident, it could be useful to hone in on what separates them from other realms. So in a temporal sense, if accidents could be made less productive or less repeatable, what would they be? *Let us now embark upon a thought dĂ©rive, to consider the difference between accident and coincidence. Coincidence is also a relation of time and space, from the medieval Latin coincidentia meaning 'occupation of the same space', also from co-, 'together with' and incidere, 'fall upon or into'. What overlaps here is the confluence of the spatial and the interpersonal at an intersection with the temporal. This may at first may appear not so dissimilarly from the accident, but the vector form of the accident, from the verb accidere (ad- meaning 'towards, to' and cadere 'to fall') bears a subtle difference with the stop-time of coincidence. Accidents move; they move futures and premeditate an ensuing sequence of events which occur by virtue of the transformatory nature of the accident. The coincidence, on the other hand, merely 'happens'; things, people, and circumstances come together, and there is no connotation of a better or worse future in relation to that which was prior to the coincidence. This approaches something like ç·Ł yuĂĄn, a Chinese concept most often translated as 'fate' or 'destiny'. The western reading of this sounds fixed in the sense of ordained trajectories of time, but we may argue here that yuĂĄn merely gives a logical reason, or acceptance, behind things that 'merely happen'. The character ç·Ł yuĂĄn is composed of the web of relations, çłž sÄ« (meaning 'thread'), with ćœ– tuǎn, from ćœ–èŸž tuĂ ncĂ­ (meaning 'to determine') and representing the first two sections of the "Ten Wings" (*ćçżŒ *shĂ­ yĂŹ) commentaries on The Book of Changes (易經 YĂŹjÄ«ng). It is in this space of subjective perspective which allows for the constancy of change despite our inclinations to rebel from the fixity of predetermined futures and the supposed will of fate. Time is captured as a series of coincidences. We fall together in spite of ourselves, and the futures they beget are not to be grasped but simply to be accepted. This is not to deny the efficacy of all our efforts, especially in consideration of greatly needed forms of change in society today, but perhaps there may be here a subtle shift of perception which could offer possibilities of thought and praxis.* *If we consider not the repeatability of the accident within art but the singularity of manifestations of coincidence as a form of non-utile accident (parallel to ancient Greek distinctions between ars and technē?), then perhaps in an Adornian manner, we should maintain the uselessness of art as its very usefulness in society. This is not to dismiss the need for aesthetic tools to strengthen other realms, but, but we must also do everything in our power not to dismiss the potency of the realms of the unpredictable, the irreplicable, the ineffable. Under the regime of the all-devouring divider of capitalism, coincidence may be a much needed respite from its mandates for control.* [Alternative proposal by Florian] *If we consider not the repeatability of the accident within art but the singularity of manifestations of coincidence as a form of non-utile accident, then perhaps the issue is not, as idealist aesthetics from Kant to Adorno has framed it, one of uselessness versus usefulness of art, or of autonomy and 'fait social', but to question and transcend those juxtapositions and categories [as Chuang Tzu does in his fable of the useless tree ...]. This also liberates us from the deadlock conclusion that any form of the aesthetic, the accidental, unpredictable, the irreplicable, the ineffable, ultimately ends up being 'recuperated' (to use Situationist technology), gentrified, respectively as a prototype of some app or capitalist business model, and that coincidence can be salvaged from resignation and cultural pessimism.* *Hence messy, hence spiritual, hence chaos?* 2022 December 易-notes when you grow up with this, you don't know what friction is An ice cream vendor at a fair runs out of dishes on which to serve his ice cream, and takes the waffles from the neighbouring stall, thereby inventing the waffle cone. Coincidence, serendipity, ç·Łćˆ† and chance have a more 'spiritual' or 'superstitious' tone to them, perhaps, and does this put them more at the level of individual or direct interactions which cannot so easily be replicated with intention, or by those that control resources? *Rest of the text [needs cleanup & elaboration] [-> Florian's work to elaborate/write this section] IV. LIGHT LOGISTICS, coincidence and confluence as form, semi-autonomy and post-anarchism as distributed relations to existing platforms, mistakes as sustainability V. Conclusions? - both historically, and based on newer theories/philosophies of technology (Gilbert Simondon): the line between technology discovery and artists' experimentation is blurry if not arbitrary/artificial, and ultimately based on a differentation of practices and domains of knowledge introduced in the late 17th/early 18th century scientific paradigm shift when "art(es)" [Latin, synonymous with Greek "techne"] got divided up into art vs. science vs. technology - This division has often and routinely been deplored in technology-oriented arts (i.e. new media art, art/science etc. [since we're writing this in a book for V2_...), but looking at accidental technologies and art practices, we'd argue that often - if not in most cases - accidental invention of technologies occur in art practices that are NOT declaredly technological, but think of themselves as social and cultural experiments - in other words: communal-experimental inventions of everyday technologies / "practices of everyday life" (de Certeau - note also the influence of these concepts on artistic/activist movements such as 'tactical media'); which can be 'fully manual'/'offline' technologies, but automated/operationalized any time (see Airbnb, see the New York Correspondance School vs. Facebook/Meta - both Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan privilege artists in anticipating socio-technological developments, by calling them "seismographs" and "antennas"; while our examples seem to support this hypothesis, there's the double-edged sword of a romanticist aesthetic ideology of the artist as visionary - the appropriation, mainstreaming & commodification of artists' accidental technologies (such as: Mail Art social networking into Facebook) needs to be mentioned, but leads to a fatalist impasse: artists as the unintentional trendsetters of extractive capitalism, gentrification, new capitalist business models etc.; and issue that has been discussed since the Situationist International in the 1950s/60s (by the group as "rĂ©cupĂ©ration", whose English equivalent is "hijacking"). In neoliberal times, this seismographic function of art often is its only remaining justification (for obtaining public funding, for example). - The real question is whether the artificially separated realm of the arts shouldn't be reintegrated into everyday life and social practices (references: John Dewey, Art as Experience; collective pracitces such as those of Display Distribute; documenta fifteen), which would partly obsolete the question of whether or not it should let itself hijack. [Since the semantics of hijacking still implies that art is an autonomous, separated realm from the rest of society] - If the divisions of art, technology, research, society are up for dispute - which we think they should be -, this means that their relations need to be renegotiated, as opposed to one of them (such as "technology" in a now-conventional sense) becoming the leading paradigm. (-> Simondon [?] -> Federici [?]) EXAMPLES // * artist residency as accidental prototype for Air BnB [comment: it seems like the way culture is being tooled in the last 10 years is mostly for this kind of neoliberal maximisation... is that our only recourse, are there any examples otherwise, how to unsettle this? —> "We all become the avant garde of neoliberalism"] * list of military inventions —> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_inventions * NFTs —> i liked this dialogue about it in relation to thoughts about neoliberal appropriation: https://outland.art/rhea-myers-mckenzie-wark/ * Letterboxing [my newest obsession, and 'geocaching' its propriety american cousin] —> https://www.atlasquest.com/about/history/ Propositions/thoughts for 'The Eternal Network' // * Would it be possible to consider an eternal network that allows continuous circulation without being 'end-producted' or only about scaling up? * Consider, has 'subculture' as what it was understood by mail art/zine culture networks from 60s disappeared today? Or if not, what kinds still exist in current hyper-connected world? * The importance of dis-indentification from networks? how does 'accidental' marginalisation buffer/sustain resistance to the majority? —> https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/pdf/off-the-network * Coincidence as the happy accident ____ Another question: I've been asked to contribute to a forthcoming book by V2_ on 'technological accidents'. I may have mentioned that V2_ is an institution from which I have always kept some distance since moving here in 2006 (because it used to epitomize what I perceived was wrong with 'interactive' 'art-science' art after having ditched its own roots as a 1980s post-punk subcultural artist-run space, since then lost touch with contemporary culture and never actually grasped networking and community work - which is rather ironic for an institution focused on 'unstable media' and electronic arts; it's basically a space that doesn't know itself what it stands for any more). The reason for me to participate nevertheless is that it's co-edited by Sjoerd van Tuijnen, a philosopher at Erasmus University for whom I have a lot of sympathy and whom I see as a partner in crime for future collaboration. This is the official project description: Technological Accidents – Accidental Technology “Each period of technological development, with its instruments and machines, brings its share of specialized accidents, thus revealing 'en negatif' the scope of scientific thought.” More recently, Benjamin Bratton has reversed Virilio's original, suggesting that accidents also produce technologies. Still in the midst of a global pandemic that has briefly interrupted and then intensified the hold that digital technologies exercise on our common imagination, we want to inquire into the accidents of technology, but also into the forms of power and authority they materialize. [What about the refusals of power as part of the result?] What are the specific accidents of - call them what you wish: artificial intelligence, machine learning, enhanced pattern recognition, etc., systems? What do accidents tell us about the technology that generates them? [thought of example of the AI chatbot Tay that became racist in 16 hours and had to be shut off?] How are these technological failures tied up with the creation and recreation of economic rationalities? Are we accidentally moving towards a new stage of capitalism, or perhaps to something that lies beyond? What kinds of alternatives to ‘the economy’ may gain traction in the break-downs and errors of current technological “advancements” and logistical webs of transport and distribution? How could we salvage and appropriate accidents? How could goods, people and credit move differently when we take accidents to be more than incidental to our existing infrastructures of life support? And do the events that come to mind really qualify as "accidents", or are they rather extended forms of functionality, which may be undesired, but not "dysfunctional" in the way that the derailment of a train appears dysfunctional? Of course, I couldn't help thinking of Display Distribute when I read the question: "What kinds of alternatives to ‘the economy’ may gain traction in the break-downs and errors of current technological “advancements” and logistical webs of transport and distribution?" (as well as the sentences following this question). Therefore my very tentative question is whether you might be interested in getting involved and co-writing this article? *invitation letter: Dear Florian Cramer, V2_Publishing is working on an anthology to be published by the middle of next year on the topic of ‘technological accidents’. V2_ has published several book series and stand-alone volumes, including single-author works and multiple-author anthologies. Some of our better-known titles are The Art of the Accident, Information Is Alive, The Politics of the Impure, Feelings Are Always Local, The Sympathy of Things and Vital Beauty. Contributing authors have included Zygmunt Bauman, Antonio Damasio, Mike Davis, Manuel DeLanda, Katherine Hayles, Lewis Hyde, Tim Ingold, Lynn Margulis, Brian Massumi, Humberto Maturana, Frank Pasquale, Luciana Parisi, Peter Sloterdijk, Wendy Steiner, Isabelle Stengers, Bernard Stiegler, Francisco Varela, Paul Virilio, Mackenzie Wark and many others. Our books often bring together the writings of authors from very different fields with contributions by artists around a single theme that we feel is as much a part of the contemporary theoretical debate as it is current in the arts. We strongly believe that an art organization like ours is the ideal platform for messy, hybrid books like these, which contain as much imagery as they do text and feature not only essays but also interviews – books that are often impossible to publish in the context of academia or mainstream theory. This year’s theme is: technological accidents. This topic will be traversed, explored and investigated in a book entitled Technological Accidents and Accidental Technology, to be jointly edited by V2_ publisher Joke (Dutch for Johanna) Brouwer, and theorists Sjoerd van Tuinen and Rogier van Reekum (Erasmus University Rotterdam). The book will also feature art projects by the artist Paolo Cirio and the artist duo Driessens & Verstappen. We hope to have triggered your enthusiasm to participate in our project. We would be truly honored if you would be willing to write an essay, preferably of between 5,000 and 7,500 words. The deadline would be this Summer, and we can offer an honorarium of €750. We work with speed but also precision. It usually takes us about two months to gather, review and (if necessary) edit the essays. The volume is then designed and printed within two months after that. We are therefore planning to publish this book by the end of Summer 2022. V2_ receives subsidies from the Dutch government, enabling us to keep our books’ prices affordable for students. Our books also enjoy a wide readership because of the nature of the topics and the diverse backgrounds of the authors. Again, we hope you will be interested in contributing to our book, and we look forward to hearing from you. Yours, Joke, Rogier, and Sjoerd