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F A L L _ A P A R T :

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 side effects. Artists working with technology during the late 1960s and early 1970s focused particularly on machines geared toward failure.

By considering how failure emerges at this moment in art and technology, the essay suggests that the program of failure potentially reveals more about the drive of the automated machine than its recognized successes.

Published in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, April 2005.