### 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, may be the strongest example of such a catastrophe in recent art practice, but it remains debatable whether it intrinsically resulted from the commune's socio-psychological technology (which also included a computer program that generated a randomized daily "fuck list" for commune members in order to prevent them from establishing traditional family relations). 

 Mail Art, which had originated in largely the same 1960s countercultural-performative art scene as the Muehl commune, experienced multiple structural problems on the level of its networking infrastructure and protocols. Its prototyping of Internet social media happened partly accidentally, since its orginal objective had not been an alternative system of mass communication, but a self-organized, non-hierarchical, inclusive alternative to the curatorial art system of museums and galleries. When became "The Eternal Network", ultimately dissociating itself from art, it not only prototyped Internet social media, but also its operational issues.^[In some cases, Mail Art communities even were direct precursors to online social media, via a number of Mail Art electronic dial-up computer systems ("BBS") that existed in the 1980s to 1990s, and via Mail Art discussion boards on proto-Internet social media such as the Canadian version of the French Minitel system (through the Montréal-based group _Sociète de Conservation du Présent_) and the U.S. American dial-up computer discussion boards _EchoNYC_ (New York, through the Mail Artist Mark Bloch) and _The Well_ (San Francisco, through the periodical Artcom). _The Well_, created in the 1980s by Stewart Brand's _Whole Earth Catalogue_ publishing company, became historicized in Howard Rheingold's 1993 best-selling book _The Virtual Community_. The book later inspired the designs of large-scale social networks such as AOL and Facebook.] Spam became a problem in Mail Art already in the 1970s. Many of its participants later testified that they gave up because of the quantities of "junk mail", mostly coming from people who used Mail Art as a low-entry system for becoming part of publications and exhibitions. Effectively, the "Eternal Network" was used as a vehicle of self-promotion, most blatantly by the Italian businessman Guglielmo Achille Cavellini who used Mail Art to spread his individual brand in the form of ubiquitous stickers that advertised his artist career.  
 
Since Mail Artists had as their code of conduct not to refuse any contribution, there was no structural solution to the problem. In addition, the open participation and free speech ethos in some cases meant that questionable contributions were accepted and multiplied, such as a series of antisemitic caricatures in a 1975 issue of the San Francisco-based Mail Art zine _VILE_ that bear striking visual similarity with the contemporary antisemitic Internet meme of the "happy merchant". "The Eternal Network" also included transgressive projects such as the "Adolf Hitler fanclub" of the British mail artist Pauline Smith which, in its time and by fellow artists, was seen as parodistic, but whose motives seem more dubious if one reads up Smith's comments on Hitler.^["I was struck by the way Hitler’s description of decadent Austrian democracy prior to WW1 could equally well suit the last few British governments. In 1971 ruthless destruction of the community in which I lived was being carried out by commercially minded people whilst those who had the power to stop this happening stood by like reeds in the wind," Pauline Smith, "Corpse Club", in: Banana, Anna. _About VILE_. Vancouver: Banana Productions, 1983, p. 59-60.] 

In retrospect, spamming, trolling, and political subcultures like the "Alternative Right" ("Alt-Right") were forecasted in "The Eternal Network". In his 2001 book _Networked Art_, Craig A. Saper characterized Mail Art practice as "intimate bureaucracies" in which artists effectively turned themselves into administrative network operators (or, in today's terminology: sysadmins).^[Saper, Craig J. _Networked Art_. University of Minnesota Press, 2001.] Network administration means to cope with accidents, and catastrophes, in real-time, especially when - like in Mail Art, or in internet social media - the network is simultaneously the information carrier and, at least to some degree, the information itself. Pauline Smith's apartment was raided by the police in 1976, in the same year when her London collaborator and fellow mail artist Genesis P-Orridge was put on trial for using pornographic images on postcards. In both cases, it is difficult to state whether the "Eternal Network's" pre-digital social networking had _created_ accidents or _was_ the accident itself. 

This question became even more difficult to answer when network bureaucracies became algorithmic regimes, and when the Eternal Network operators who worked in the manner of Mieko Shiomi and others - designing and dispatching prompts, assembling the feedback - were replaced by bots. In March 2016, Microsoft's research division launched _Tay_, an AI chat bot on Twitter. As opposed to most other commercial machine learning-based software today, this bot had not completed its training before it was launched, but used all chat interactions as its continued machine learning input. The launch historically coincidended with Donald Trump's first successful presidential campaign and its militant support through the extreme-right "Alt Right" in Internet meme and troll forums. After word about Tay had spread on the main "Alt Right" forum at that time (the "/pol" or "politically incorrect" board on the website 4chan), user interactions retrained Tay into an aggressively racist, fascist and Holocaust-denying chat bot within only few hours. 16 hours after its launch, Microsoft took Tay offline. 

Tay does not seem to fit a linear cause-and-effect logic according to which technologies either create their own accidents and catastrophes (such as the invention of the car having resulted in ca. 1.3 million deaths per year in car accidents and another estimated 385,000 premature deaths through air pollution^[Anenberg, Susan, et al. "A global snapshot of the air pollution-related health impacts of transportation sector emissions in 2010 and 2015." _International Council on Clean Transportation_, Washington, DC, USA (2019).]), or accidents and catastrophes conversely foster new technologies, such as modern information and computer technology born out of the British and American defense against Nazi Germany, or the high-tech innovations of Dutch "Delta Works" water management after the country's flood catastrophe in 1953. As radically open feedback systems that digest their own networks, in largely unprotected modes, both Tay and Mail Art could be called simultaneous causes and effects of accidents. Their constructions are recipes for disaster,  to the point where it becomes impossible to differentiate what is the technology and is the accident in them. In the case of Mail Art - but not of Microsoft -, this recipe and its possible consequences were even intentionally chosen by the artists, as a radical experiment, ultimately going back to Fluxus, and - beyond that - to John Cage's indeterministic composition, only that it no longer operated in safe space, but in an open environment.  

Other open works (to use (Eco)'s term) including Shiomi's Spatial Poem or Tristan Tzara's 1920 instruction to create a Dadaist poem by cutting out and randomly combining the words of an arbitrary newspaper article, could be escalated in similar ways to yield similar catastrophic real-life dynamics. A number of Fluxus pieces called "Danger Music" - such as Takehisa Kosugi's 1964 instruction to "[s]coop out one of your eyes 5 years from now and do the same with the other eye 5 years later" - suggested this route. The example of Tay and 4chan suggests that contemporary Danger Music no longer plays in the arts, but in digital technology, with 4chan itself being perhaps the best example of a catastrophic cybernetic heir of Dada, and of technology be

itself being a perfect example of technology=accident.


In retrospect, spamming, trolling, and political subcultures like the "Alternative Right" ("Alt-Right") were forecasted in "The Eternal Network". In his 2001 book _Networked Art_, Craig A. Saper characterized Mail Art practice as "intimate bureaucracies" in which artists effectively turned themselves into administrative network operators (or, in today's terminology: sysadmins).^[Saper, Craig J. _Networked Art_. University of Minnesota Press, 2001.] Network administration means to cope with accidents, and catastrophes, in real-time, especially when - like in Mail Art, or in internet social media - the network is simultaneously the information carrier and, at least to some degree, the information itself. Pauline Smith's apartment was raided by the police in 1976, in the same year when her London collaborator and fellow mail artist Genesis P-Orridge was put on trial for using pornographic images on postcards. In both cases, it is difficult to state whether the "Eternal Network's" pre-digital social networking had _created_ accidents or _was_ the accident itself.