* **🔶 🔷 notes ACCIDENTAL TECHNOLOGY notes 🔘 🔳**
# 

[proposed working title:]

# Accidental technologies and/in art practice



 difficult to differentiate from techno-social practices anyway 

 [good examples include experimental platform and community building 

 in hacker culture vs./and in contemporary art, development of experimental tools (Raindance Corporation, Lifepatch, varia/Hackers \& Designers), but also the difficult and often arbitrary differentiations of experimental social/political communities [squatting, experimental lifestyle communes] and collective/community art practices [residencies, collectives etc.; in Western art/design history at least traceable to the socialist Arts \& Crafts communities in the 19th century; in East Asian histories to monastries, anarchist/revolutionary groups {?!?}]

              \/

Artistic Practice (Research?) as Accidental Technology

           * /\                                                                 /\
    in broadest sense                                     as opposed to prevalence of military invention 

   *     [not sure about this opposition, thinking of Italian futurism and "avant-garde" as an originally military concept that still informs technology-oriented art; also the furthering of Italian futurism into Afro- and Sinofuturism; see also the example of Lamarr/Antheil]
   * - what does accidental artistic invention do    
   *    differently than martial invention?
   * - how to delve into this without romanticising?
   * - art as human self-experimentation
   * 



I.   Intro

examples of art as accidental technological inventions through artists/as part of artist projects

   * tile mosaics and abstract painting as invention of raster/pixel graphics [including the Bayer filter technology of digital photography and videography]
   * invention of wireless frequency hopping technology, modelled on player pianos, through actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil in 1941 (as support of the US army in WW II)
   * invention/preempetion of electronic libraries by El Lissitzky in the 1920s (manifesto "Our book" published in Kurt Schwitters' MERZ) 
   * preemption of AI model-based text prompt image generation in Cornelia Sollfrank's 1999 "net.art generators", a work that included complex reflections of the authorship and copyright implications of algorithms
   * origins of Airbnb as a social design project by design students
   * preemption/anticipation of today's social media video platforms (YouTube, TikTok) in video art projects such as Infermental (1980s), Van Gogh TV (documenta IX 1992), One Minutes, of Instagram self-fashioning in Cindy Sherman's self-portraits, of Internet memes in John Heartfield's and Barbara Kruger's visual work etc.etc.
   * social networking in the "New York Correspondance School" founded by Ray Johnson in 1962; networked/remote publishing by Mieko Shiomi's "Spatial Poem" in 1965


...are reciprocal to accidental discoveries in science (i.e. where discoveries do not follow logical deduction or as a proof of a scientific theory, but as 'creative' accidents):

   *     x-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen
   *     pennicilin by Alexander Fleming
   *     vulcanized rubber by Charles Goodyear
   *     microwaves as heating technology by Percy Spencer
   *     pacemaker by Wilson Greatbatch
   *     Sildenafil/Viagra by Pfizer (originally meant to treat heart blood vessel diseases)
   *     safety pin by Walter Hunt
   *     Arpanet/Internet (originally meant to more efficiently distribute computational resources of timesharing computers in research institutions, while e-mail became its most popular function)


vs. technological accidents:

   * Extrapool/Knust's attempt to find a healthier, non-toxic printing process, which resulted in the invention of full-color Riso printing and the explosion of artist-run DIY publishing/printmaking in the 2010s/2020s 
   * Microsoft's Tay bot and its (re)programming through 4chan's Alt-Right in 2016
(can also be framed in relation to Post-Internet art and philosophical right-wing accelerationism, with artist Brad Troemel having asked the question ¨What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn From 4Chan" in 2010[http://artfcity.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ART-PRODUCED-FROM-THE-SOCIAL-INTERACTIONS-OF-A-NETWORK-OF-PARTICIPANTS-YOURE-DOING-IT-WRONG.jpg](http://artfcity.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ART-PRODUCED-FROM-THE-SOCIAL-INTERACTIONS-OF-A-NETWORK-OF-PARTICIPANTS-YOURE-DOING-IT-WRONG.jpg)

[this is a stab at Liam Gillick, who happened to be Hito Steyerl's collaborator in the documenta fifteen piece she withdrew from the event]

 



    

It would be a (romanticist) simplification of art if one would generally and sweepingly credit it for accidental technologies. The opposite is also true:

   * In the field of digital technologies, science fiction literature has historically served as the direct inspiration for technological research and development, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence. [Computer hackers also are among the most avid readers and viewers of science fiction literature, films and tv.] One could argue that science fiction often functions as a blueprint for a technology - a highly elaborate, systematically developed blueprint - and thus as the very opposite of an "accidental technology".
   * Art practices can also promote simple activities to technologies by practicing (and elaborating) them as work methods: examples include the Dadaists who developed the cutting-and-pasting of newspaper cut-outs in Swiss folk art into collage and photomontage, and the subsequent technologies and industries centered around photomontage, and ultimately, AI image generators.
   
   - from newspaper illustration to its modelling in software from Photoshop to  Dall-E -,  the "event" in Fluxus (which could arguably seen as a prototype of today's event industry) and "nonkrong" in Indonesian art collectives and documenta fifteen. In such cases, art often serves as a bridge or interface for these activities to being further developed into business models, technologies and industries. A good example is how situationist psychogeography and its transformation into "cultural probes" and service design as an industry and technology.
    



II.  Networks, Artistic Movements, Mail Art (centralisation -> decentralised -> distributed)

-> focus on New York Correspondance School and its outliers in the 1970s/80s (General Idea's FILE etc. up to Vittore Baroni's 1983 "Real Correspondence" diagram, [https://i.pinimg.com/564x/10/e1/27/10e127f3850d4e8b3f70451871fb191d.jpg)](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/10/e1/27/10e127f3850d4e8b3f70451871fb191d.jpg))



   * 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?)


[-> Florian's work to elaborate/write this section]



III. DIY, Self-experimentation, raising meta-narratives (conscientiousness of 'media'), not romanticising



[could maybe wrapped into II \& IV, what do you think?]



IV. LIGHT LOGISTICS, coincidence and confluence as form, semi-autonomy and post-anarchism as distributed relations to existing platforms, mistakes as sustainability



[Elaine]



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 "récupération", 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 practices 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](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/](https://outland.art/rhea-myers-mckenzie-wark/)
   * Letterboxing [my newest obsession, and 'geocaching' its propriety american cousin] —> [https://www.atlasquest.com/about/history/](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](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?



 Here's the official 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