[microsound] MACHINES FALL APART: FAILURE IN ART AND TECHNOLOGY

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxx>]

FYI, an elaborate historicization of failure vis-à-vis E.A.T.
    - tV



tobias c. van Veen -----------++++
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org --
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com --
McGill Communication + Philosophy
ICQ: 18766209 | AIM: thesaibot +++


=====

MACHINES FALL APART: FAILURE IN ART AND TECHNOLOGY
http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/leaauthors/2005-April/000037.html
Leonardo Electronic Almanac 13:4 April 2005

by Jennifer Gabrys
Department of Art History and Communication Studies
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, QC H3A 2T6
Canada
mail at signalspace.net
http://www.signalspace.net


KEYWORDS

failure, art and technology, automation, side effects, obsolescence,
Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), Jean Tinguely, Gustav Metzger
ABSTRACT

Technological failure is central to the logic of innovation; it exhibits the
scope of the machine's profuse promises unfulfilled, while generating new
assurances against a landscape of side effects. Artists working with
technology at the inception of widespread automation, including Jean
Tinguely and Gustav Metzger, focused particularly on machines geared toward
failure. At the same time, E.A.T., an organization founded for the
collaboration between artists and engineers, encountered failure at times
unintentionally and attempted to recast the role that failure plays in
experimentation. By considering how failure emerges at this moment in art
and technology, this article suggests that the program of failure
potentially reveals more about the drive of the automated machine than its
recognized successes.

---------------------------------

SELF-DESTRUCTING MACHINES

Failure has struck the "largest machine in the world" several times over.
The North American northeastern power network, which broke down most
recently in 2003, and before that in 1977 and 1965, is a single synchronous
system that is capable of causing what have been called the biggest
blackouts in history, silencing the motors of half a continent with its
sudden collapse [1]. Writing in "The Great Northeastern Power Failure,"
Billy Klüver, engineer at Bell Labs and co-founder of Experiments in Art and
Technology, suggested of the 1965 blackout that "the whole thing could have
been an artist's idea - to make us aware of something. [2]" Failure is a
special skill of artists; pushing a system toward collapse is a practice for
which they are ideally suited. But the power failure, which *could* have
been attributed to an artist, was instead the work of technology - the
result of one faulty switch and a succession of automated crashes. Power
grids, phone lines and computer networks continually threaten and trigger
episodes of mechanical disintegration. Computer breakdown is so synonymous
with disaster that it constitutes a risk against which one can purchase
insurance coverage. But the failure of machines and their networks
simultaneously presents opportunities for new insight. Reflecting on the
1965 power failure, Klüver proposed, "in the future there will exist
technological systems as complicated and as large as the northeastern power
grid whose sole purpose will be to intensify our lives through increased
awareness". If a system is to reveal its critical operations, it must fail.
Technological failure is central to the logic of innovation; it exhibits the
scope of the machine's profuse promises unfulfilled, while generating new
assurances against a landscape of side effects. Failure is a decisive
component of technology, but often it is art that most blatantly exposes the
machine's inexorable drive toward its own termination.

Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., had its beginnings with a
collaboration between Klüver and artist Jean Tinguely. The project, *Homage
to New York*, staged the self- destruction of a machine in the sculpture
garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1960. From scouring for
materials in the New Jersey garbage dumps to designing electrical circuitry
to overheat and collapse, Klüver and Tinguely pushed the usual boundaries of
art and technology by playing with the life and death of the machine. In
this historic performance of mechanical disintegration, the deliberate
failure of the machine reveals one of its most compelling uses: its ability
to waste itself. In "The Garden Party," an essay written two days after the
MOMA event, Klüver gave a minute-by-minute description of the machine's
self-destructive performance [3]. Recounting the chain of aesthetic
disasters that were triggered during the 27- minute escapade, Klüver
suggested that machines that fail to function according to plan correspond
with the unpredictability and provocation of a city such as New York (and
from this derives the "homage"). In a society of complete control, where
everything must function according to plan, Klüver contends that failure is
impermissible. The *Homage* pays tribute to failure, as Tinguely's machine
sputters toward a chaotic version of artistic and technological freedom.

As "l'art ephemere," the *Homage* sought to capture the shifting terrain of
a world that is constantly remade. Failure here reveals the logic of
transience. In fact, ephemeral art points to ephemeral technology, where
innovation requires endless change. Within the objectives of modernity,
change is imperative and stasis impermissible. In this sense, a society of
complete control would be a society of constant change - and by extension,
perpetual failure. Failure ensures the demise and erasure of the existing to
make room for the new. Later documented and published in the catalog for the
exhibition, *The Machine at the End of the Mechanical Age*, Tinguely's
*Homage* and Klüver's essay captured this shift within the technological
from mechanical to informational. The curator for the show, Pontus K.
Hultén, made another type of homage to the mechanical machine at the moment
of its presumed historic demise. He begins the catalog with an essay that
remarks, "This exhibition is dedicated to the mechanical machine, the great
creator and destroyer, at a difficult moment in its life when, for the first
time, its reign is threatened by other tools" [4]. Those "other tools" are
of course information machines - including the computer - that were
replacing and controlling the more archaic mechanical devices. At the end of
the mechanical age, an exhibit- as-burial is staged in order to put these
rejected machines to rest. But the central dynamic of self-obsolescing
technology remains fully operative, and so the end of machines is
continually repeated as a demonstration of the code and motor of failure.

PROGRAMMED FAILURE: THE BLACK BOX

In his manifesto-for-failure, Klüver elaborated on the rationale for
*Homage*, arguing that it was not motivated by an anti-technological agenda,
but rather that it captured the machine's constant oscillation between on
and off, between creation and destruction. In other words, he notes, "The
self- destruction or self-elimination of the machine is the ideal of good
machine behavior" [5]. In this case, the "ideal" machine Klüver describes
functions as an information machine, a device capable not only of the
transfer of signals, but also of self- modification and regulation.
Discussing these machines, which effectively shut themselves off only to
turn on again, Klüver references the work of Claude Shannon, who had also
been employed at Bell Labs. With respect to the mechanism of self-
destruction, Klüver writes, "this idea has already been expressed by Claude
Shannon in the 'Little Black Box,' in which, when you pull a switch, a lid
opens and a hand emerges that throws the switch in the off position,
whereupon the lid closes again over the hand" [6]. Shannon has devised a
machine to operate on machines, an abstract device that is programmed for
termination. In this program, destruction is automated. "You" pull the
switch, but the automatic "hand" turns it off. Such a dynamic suggests an
internal and correcting impulse that necessarily oscillates toward the off
position. Tinguely's machine operates within this same logic. At the
beginning of the *Homage*, Klüver flips a switch, and from that point on the
automated machine is allowed to perform its inevitable itinerary toward
destruction. Failure is in fact a correcting device. It is an operative form
of feedback and control. Within automation, feedback constitutes the
programming of machines, and as Marshall McLuhan suggests, this feedback is
what differentiates the "computer-programmed 'machine'" from linear,
mechanical machines. Within the loop of feedback, "the programming can now
include endless changes of program" [7]. Through programming, a machine may
then be directed toward a performance of self- elimination, an oscillation
that makes way for new and improved forms of innovation. Elimination is an
unexamined program that Tinguely's machines attempt to draw out, but even
this encounter cannot fully account for the process of machinic
transformation that hinges, secretly, on failure. Because art, as it turns
out, is equally subject to the forces of failure.

ART OF FAILURE

Art writes expanded programs for technological failure. It is drawn to the
machine's terminal moments. The failure of technology is even the mark of
successful art. Jack Burnham, writing in "Art and Technology: the Panacea
that Failed," addresses "machine-driven" constructions such as Tinguely's,
"which are programmed in many instances to break down or malfunction." The
question Burnham considers is why, particularly at this moment (in the
1970s), "should the only successful art in the realm of twentieth-century
technology deal with the absurdity and fallibility of the machine?" [8].
Art, in its encounter with technology, forces and delights in failure. But
failure is not always clearly discernible as a deliberate performance of
destruction. Following Tinguely and Klüver's collaboration on *Homage*,
E.A.T. moved to implement a number of projects infused with technological
optimism. Artists submitted technical questions to engineers, asking whether
assistance could be provided in becoming weightless or harnessing dreams. In
the presence of such utopian aspirations were a number of unintentional
technological breakdowns. Writers and artists, including Lucy Lippard and
Jack Burnham, have commented on the "failures" within E.A.T.'s projects,
noting the degree to which technological feats do not go according to plan.
Writing on E.A.T.'s *Nine Evenings* performance in 1966, which staged the
integration of theatre and engineering through elaborate technical
performances, Lippard commented on the noticeable inability of machines to
actually do much of anything at all. She complains not only of pervasive
technical failure, but also of an impossible grandiosity of purpose, and
ultimately of a failed meeting of art and technology [9]. Similarly, Burnham
suggested that much of *Nine Evenings* was full of expectant delays, where
the audience lingered for hours waiting for the machines to demonstrate
their marvels. But the theatre of the machine ultimately proved to be a
theatre of failure. Robert Breer, one of the participating artists, admitted
when interviewed at a later date that with respect to the technological
aspects of the performance, "Nothing worked" [10].

IMPOSSIBLE FAILURE

Despite the criticisms of E.A.T.'s deployment of art and technology, Klüver
has suggested that failure is a necessary mechanism that allows innovation
to occur. He wrote of Tinguely's *Homage* that "in the same way as a
scientific experiment can never fail, this experiment in art could never
fail." Failure was impossible because the project did not attempt to fulfill
functional criteria. Functioning and failure become equally useless factors
in Klüver's equation. He privileges the experiment to such an extent that
failure actually takes precedence. This perspective comes from the research
labs of technology and engineering, where scientists are expected to fail
repeatedly. As Klüver asserts, "Most industrial firms consider that a
research man who fails 96 percent of the time is more valuable than one who
succeeds more often, because he is involved in truly important
experimentation. Success in art is very easy; how to fail is the problem"
[11]. The revised formula of progress: success is a dead-end, failure a
golden opportunity. Failure, in an assessment that could have been written
by Thomas Kuhn, precipitates discovery. Kuhn considers how anomaly and
crisis not only tip the balance toward invention, but also how "the changes
in which these discoveries were implicated were all destructive as well as
constructive." In order for the full contribution of innovation to register,
accepted practices and knowledge must be discarded. The breakdown of the
usual criteria allows for a new approach. In this sense, as Kuhn notes,
"failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones" [12].

This is the mechanism of failure, where breakdown accelerates the
corresponding rate of innovation. Such an observation resonates with Gordon
Moore's delineation of the doubling of technological capabilities every 18
months. The dynamic of innovation and obsolescence exposes the mechanisms of
excess central to computing and information technology. Moore reveals that
if followed to its logical conclusion, the law would reach its crisis point.
He states, "any exponential like that predicts a disaster if you extrapolate
it far enough." The hypothetical disaster that emerges here is the result of
the endless duplication of technological innovations. Failure in the form of
overload is directly connected to the failure that emerges from the
necessity to innovate. In an interview where Moore recounts his early years
at Intel, the interviewer states, "I think that's one nice thing we can say
about Silicon Valley is it's OK to fail. We've all done it...." To this
Moore agrees, revealing just how central the structure of failure is to new
technology. He recounts, "There was really no stigma at all to failing and
that's been an important part of this area... just, all the new companies
that have formed with relatively no concern about the risks" [13]. Failure
has its "fallout," and every failed invention suggests as many directions
for new developments. Failure is systematized as part of the logic of
innovation.

That failure which is central to the "structure of scientific revolutions"
also constitutes the moment in which art realizes its closest affinity to
technology: in the drive not only to make, but also to unmake the world. In
this sense, art is not a practice apart from technology and its associated
markets, but is instead integral to these very mechanisms. But this
assessment does not point toward the closure of the supposed non-
instrumentality of art. Instead, it indicates that those apparently rational
and deterministic systems of technology are as random as a sputtering
out-of-control gadget assembled from the dregs of a dump for artful
dissimulation. Failure is just this side of entropy and catastrophe. It
performs while containing and recuperating moments of destruction. And this
is how failure constitutes a program, defining as it does the limits of
functionality while allowing for a return to further production. Failure
necessarily occurs within the limits of the system that defines it as
failure. It does not level that system, but rather renders it momentarily
inoperative. But this is the recuperative function of failure, because from
breakdown a new space of innovation emerges. The point of this article is
not to suggest the catastrophic run of technology, so much as to demonstrate
how failure becomes a mechanism of adaptation, a delineation of excess, and
a revelation of limits. Because failure reminds that as much as the promise
of complete collapse lingers as a definitive fulfillment and terminal point,
technology is instead composed of adaptive, self-destructing and remaking
mechanisms: a patchwork of dismembered and reassembled parts.

FAILURE TO FAIL

In this sense, failure has the capacity to set off a range of unintended
consequences, and in this zone of side effects, failure may even fail to
fail. Tinguely's *Homage* staged the performance of a machine that failed to
operate according to plan, even though the plan entailed a course of self-
destruction. Such an automated device triggers a set of chain reactions that
amplify and expand beyond the original intention. Writing just after the
1960 performance, John Canaday points out in the *New York Times* that on
the whole the *Homage* did not fulfill the mechanical functions that it
promised. Comprised of 15 motors, which were geared to produce automatic
drawings and to burst balloons, the mechanism failed to perform fully its
intended functions [14]. In failing to make good on its promise of extreme
and novel capability, the self-destructing machine emulates the
characteristic quality of all machines - informational and otherwise - to
fall short of expectation, failing !
  even in
  the promise to fail. We expect machines to go out with a bang, but instead
they gasp and tilt, and are narrowly held together without quite collapsing
completely. In the failure to fail, technology loses its sublimity.
Destruction ceases to be grandiose, and instead verges on lampooning self-
mockery.

Such a form of destruction tips toward the accidental. A project such as
Tinguely's reveals the automated machine's tendency to activate innumerable
unintentional consequences. Klüver writes that "as a functional object, the
suicide carriage was supposed to move; as a work of art, it wasn't. This was
typical of Jean's relation to the motor" [15]. Intention wavers in the space
between art and technology; the attempt to build unintention into the
process reveals that it was a dynamic inherent to the machine all along.
Such a discovery resonates with Langdon Winner's discussion of
"technological drift." Between the extremes of control and breakdown lies
the more common event of unintended consequence. Winner writes, "The picture
of technological change that begins to emerge from our discussion is not
that of a law-bounded process grinding to an inevitable conclusion. It is
rather that of a variety of currents and innovation moving in a number of
directions toward highly uncerta!
  in
  destinations" [16]. The question is then how we make use of unintention,
which ultimately becomes a site of productivity: "*technology is most
productive when its ultimate range of results is neither foreseen nor
controlled*. To put it differently, technology always does more than we
intend; we know this so well that it has actually become part of our
intentions." Side effects lead to innovation. The unforeseen, as a condition
of risk and failure, gives rise to adaptation and technological advance. As
Winner writes, "in effect, we are committed to following a drift -
accumulated unanticipated consequences given the name *progress*" [17].

Another type of accumulation emerges, however, in the drift of technological
failure. In a larger environment that is replete with admonitions about the
end of time, technological commodities perform smaller versions of this
ending, the brink of cultural suicide on which we are always poised, through
the engine of obsolescence. Commodities - particularly technological
commodities - are produced with a rapidly diminishing expiration date. They
are subject to "planned failure," a term synonymous with obsolescence.
Failure is planned through the lapsed usefulness and desirability of
commodities. As Moore's law makes evident, technological commodities are the
ideal site for this performance of obsolescence. A form of programmed
failure that occurs both systematically and at the level of individual
gadgets, obsolescence ensures that the engine of failure is capable of
driving markets as much as inventions. If production is to increase, then
innovation must accelerate, and a corre!
  sponding
  increase in failure and breakdown must result. A side effect of such
rampant production and obsolescence is, of course, the colossal amount of
rubbish that accumulates as the material discarded in the pursuit of
failure.

Rubbish forms the larger and increasingly more prevalent "fallout" of
failure. Perhaps this is why rubbish figured so largely in Tinguely's
self-destructing machine. Assembling a quasi-functioning mechanism from the
junk of New Jersey garbage dumps, Tinguely reanimated the remains of failed
devices and abandoned scrap. He recuperated the debris only to have it
disintegrate once again. Art in its meeting with technology exposes the
remains of this drive to fail. It arrives at even grander and more
extravagant examples of breakdown. In this sense, failure is revealed as a
space of imagining, encompassing the drive of art, technological innovation,
and markets. But in the wreckage remaining after Tinguely's performance
(which was duly returned to the dump), the failure of the machine announces
just how far technology drifts toward a landscape of side effects. The
leftovers from the *Homage* indicate the imperfection of obsolescence.
Ideally, no trace should be left in the trans!
  formation
  from innovation to failure and back again. But failure fails to fail, and
we are finally left to contend with the debris of our automated aspirations.

---------------------------------

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. See Rachel Emma Silverman, "Power Failures," in *The Wall Street Journal
Millennium (A Special Report): Futurology* (December 31, 1999) R12.

2. Billy Klüver, "The Great Northeastern Power Failure" (New York: College
Art Association Annual Meeting, 1966).

3. B. Klüver, "The Garden Party," in K.G. Pontus Hultén, Ed., *The Machine
as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age* (New York, NY: Museum of Modern
Art, 1968).

4. Pontus Hultén, "Introduction," K.G. Pontus Hultén, Ed., *The Machine as
Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age* (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art,
1968) p. 6.

5. B. Klüver [3] p. 171.

6. B. Klüver [3] p. 171.

7. Marshall McLuhan, "Automation," in *Understanding Media* (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1964) p. 356.

8. Jack Burnham, "Art and Technology: The Panacea that Failed," in Kathleen
Woodward, Ed., *The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial
Culture* (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1980) p. 201.

9. Lucy Lippard, in *Art International Journal* (20 January 1967).

10. Robert Breer, telephone interview with Harriet DeLong, 12 February,
1973. E.A.T. archives at the Daniel Langlois Foundation.

11. See Douglas Davis, "Billy Klüver: The Engineer as a Work of Art," in
*Art and the Future: A History / Prophecy of the Collaboration between Art
and Technology* (New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, 1973) p. 145.

12. Thomas S. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1962]) pp. 66- 68.

13. Gordon Moore, interview 3 March 1995, *Silicon Genesis: An Oral History
of Semiconductor Technology*, Stanford and the Silicon Valley Project
(accessed at http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/complete_listing.html , 5
March 2005).

14. John Canaday, "Odd Kind of Art: Thoughts on Destruction and Creation
after a Suicide in the Garden," in *New York Times* (27 March 1960) X13.

15. B. Klüver [3] p. 170.

16. Langdon Winner, "Engines of Change," in *Autonomous Technology*
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977) p. 88.

17. L. Winner [16] pp. 98-99.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jennifer Gabrys is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication Studies at McGill
University. She is writing her dissertation on the phenomenon of electronic
waste, which encompasses both obsolete material hardware and the excesses of
information that litter our cultural landscapes. She is currently conducting
archival research on the post-war history of information technology through
a Mellon Foundation Fellowship with the Institute of Historical Research in
London. During 2004, she was a Researcher in Residence at the Centre for
Research and Documentation at the Daniel Langlois Foundation, where she
investigated the collections and archives on Experiments in Art and
Technology (E.A.T.), and developed a related essay, "Residue in the E.A.T.
Archives." Her research related to electronic waste and technological
environments may be found in a series of online visual essays at
www.signalspace.net.

---------------------------------


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