This research investigates the tensions between different interpretations of error: from binary and digital evaluations to the more abstract and human ways we approach and think about error. My interest comes from a meshing together of these tendencies and the slippages between various modes of interpretation:
Taking the turbulent relationship we have with digital information a step
further, in Each and Every Command (2016), the third artist Martin John
Callanan documents twelve years of every command, edit, or mistake he made
in Photoshop in an unredacted form, later printed as a book (Fig. 27) – his work
informs my project Enchiridion. Callanan draws on ideas of the post-digital and addresses agency and the artist’s place within digital systems. He adopts a systematic approach to collating his mistakes, placing the artist’s intention
within a network of human and machine relations. The list-like collation of data presents an abstracted narrative and archive of errors. Bringing together
Callanan’s data collation, Haacke’s concerns for redaction, and my own project [mis]Feeds, all of which explore breakdowns in circulation of information, an interesting relation surfaces between these repetitive and systematic practices and printmaking itself, which is often reductive. By collating data that is automatically saved to Google Drive, Callanan further investigates how autosave functions are comforting and prevent data loss through computational failure, or human error. The project alludes to the way our lives are affected by automatic save functions, the to-do lists we make, and the activity trackers we wear. From the moment we wake up, our data is constantly being saved and updated. Our dependency contributes to the post-digital sensibility, prompting the need to rethink our relationship to technology and the way it infiltrates the everyday. Conversely, this turbulent relationship could be seen to promote our use of and the assurance we find in analogue, unconnected, and physical machines, such as a typewriter. Callanan’s work reinforces the complexity of post-digital practices, because they involve digital and analogue processes and the unpredictability of people.
https://pure.plymouth.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/38493164/2023rosser10373232phd_edited.pdf
Rosser, L. (2023) The Agency of Error in Post-digital Print. Thesis. University of Plymouth. Retrieved from https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/ada-theses/83