Failing (See Also Experimenting; Testing)

There’s no shortage of glorification of failure in contemporary creative scholarship and artistic discourse. The mantra of failure has shifted from the 20th century avant-garde arts, where it was cultivated to become an art methodology, into broader public discourse, largely because of unmet expectations in the face of technological hype. Even business schools and venture capitalism have embraced failure as another tool in the box (both of which constantly intone that we ought to “fail better!”). Because labs are places of experimentation, and experiments, often, well, fail, it’s also not surprising that there is also a substantial element of failure in contemporary lab discourse. Andreas Treske describes their Media Archaeology Lab at Bilkent University in Ankara in ways that combine production and experimentation, success and failure. Despite hosting a variety of audiovisual equipment, the lab also hosts techniques of testing: “It’s not simply an archive, and it’s not simply a production facility. It is a space where you are able to combine things in different ways, where mistakes are allowed, and where the result is creative, and therefore has the potential to allow freedom in development and practice.”41

But failure has always been and important part of laboratory technique. As we discussed in chapter 5 on Lab Imaginaries, even before the modern avant-gardes, Edison excelled in failure, turning it into part of the mythology of the inventor. That tradition is alive and well in contemporary hybrid labs. As Aymeric Mansoux argues, tongue firmly in cheek: “[. . .] the stereotypical media art lab is a space where artists who are not always sure of what they can do with media technology due to a lack of technical knowledge come to research and develop a project.”42 Of course, methodological production of failures can have epistemological value considering how central failure is in net art and glitch art which attempt to show the cracks and stitches beneath the smooth surfaces of computer interfaces and/or branding.43 Dismissing techniques of failure would be a major oversight when what’s necessary is to investigate its multiple forms of existence as a lab technique.

The discourse of risk in digital innovation, replete with slogans like “move fast and break things,” might well have hijacked contemporary notions of failure. But failure is also an elemental part of the history of technology and, as such, media-archaeological practices reveal there have always been other ways to articulate the term. While describing his plans for a media archaeology lab, Jesper Olsson points to the importance of failure as an integral part of the project: “In tinkering with old, forgotten, and dead media it opens our eyes to mistakes, waste, and failure. It offers a space for ‘broken world thinking’ (Steven Jackson), which could be considered crucial today.”44 As Olsson points out, the focus on brokenness can itself be an entry point for an alternative account of media technologies as both historical and contemporary. In a similar vein, Marcel O’Gorman describes his own brand of hybrid lab work as an interest in the “misfit toys, half-baked things, malfunctioning apparatuses” that are created as extensions of philosophical arguments and experiments.”45

Finally, failure is also important because it points to the possibility of moving beyond narrow functional uses, or the limits of what is currently believed to be possible. Lab spaces can operate as safe spaces for failed attempts that allow researchers to investigate the possibilities and potentials for different technologies and techniques. As Jamie Allen and Claudia Mareis put it, while the studio has long been considered “a sacrosanct place of experimentation and failure” hybrid labs carry this legacy forward in new ways that do not necessarily reproduce the various connotations of the studio as spaces designed to produce and channel individual inspiration.46