When mistakes do not cause damage, they open unexpected paths. Those small slips of intention are full of rare beauty: They are the generative equivalent of losing your way in a city that you know. They carry a sense of liminality, a refreshing unfamiliarity, eventually the thrill of what comes next, provided that you can let go, even for a while. Like the city, the machine becomes a co-author of a different story.
Digital tools invite precision. We specify formats, destinations, and parameters, expecting clean execution. Yet when something misfires the logic breaks open – accident and misinterpretation become collaboration: machine and human co-create something neither could have predicted or done alone.
A transcription system, when fed the wrong input, invents. It strings together words that produce or mimic meaning. What begins as failure becomes poetry. An OCR, when it fails to recognize the alphabet of a given text, replaces it with other symbols, that can be observed and admired separately from any possible meaning.
Errors, deviations from the plan, and accidental artistic results:
Photos taken by accident
Stickers created by accident
Asemic language created by OCR
Transcription system errors due to wrong language input: [a] original text [b] correct translation [c] error
Image from a video after an ffmpeg command ran without destination
We spend so much of our time trying to avoid mistakes – in speech, in text, in code – we dread making them, and we are often judged and scolded for making them. Yet the most memorable discoveries often happen when control is lost. When we lose orientation, we see differently. A misaligned photograph may reveal a new composition. A broken command may expose a hidden pattern. An algorithmic confusion may give us fresh poetry.
To embrace error is to suspend mastery. It means allowing the system – technological or personal – to surprise us. It’s a form of trust: a willingness to let meaning unfold rather than dictate it. Getting lost, whether in a city or in a sequence of commands, restores our capacity for wonder. It reminds us that not every route must be efficient, not every result must be correct.
Besides, an error is also a performance, a one-time act of deviation that can’t be rehearsed: a resistance that you usually only find in improvisation, and this improvisation can’t be planned, predicted, packaged, or monetized. Its value lies in its singularity: once recognized and repeated, it ceases to be error and becomes style, code, or pattern, even when the results differ. This is not necessarily a degradation but a transformation. The raw accident becomes a method, the surprise becomes craft.
In a world obsessed with optimization, the true mistake is still one of the few gestures that escape design. After all, perhaps the error is not the deviation, but the plan itself, a breaking of the illusion that outcomes can be perfectly engineered. Maybe we need to lose our way, again and again, so that the world can reappear in unfamiliar form.
