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.

This piece is part of a larger collaborative work, an interactive, infrastructure-related installation soon to be presented in the upcoming xpub group exhibition (27-30 June, S/ash Gallery, Rotterdam). I also like it as a stand-alone piece, so this is how I present it here. (Images and details regarding the installation will follow in another post.)

The poem is performative (improvisational reading) and list-based, simulating computerized speech: a form fitting the content. It makes visible the infrastructural networks that mirror nature in the organic way they form and expand. Despite their efficiency and our continuous effort to advance these man-made systems that sustain contemporary living, our dependence on them often leads to feelings of isolation and alienation, instead of fulfillment and unity. 

The imagery is a raw ffmpeg rendering of a busy city scene (Rotterdam), reduced to flickering pixels and shifting fragments. Buildings dissolve into patterns and this digital breakdown blurs and performs the boundary between technological grids and natural growth. 

Ultimately, Infrastructure invites the viewer to reflect on dependence, identity, and interconnectedness, inhabiting the fragile tension between systemic framework and lived experience.

Infrastructure Infrastructure Infrastructure

roads railways

bridges tunnels

water supply sewers

electrical grids telecommunication

do you communicate?

internet connectivity

do you feel connected?

commodities interrelated systems

services essential to enable sustain or

                                     enhance

societal living conditions

do you feel enabled? do you feel sustained?

do you feel enhanced?

hard infrastructure

physical networks

necessary for the function of a modern

industrial society

roads bridges railways

soft infrastructure

education

statistics

parks and recreation

law enforcement emergency services

Emergency Emergency Emergency

Infrastructure

synonyms

base framework

infrastructure as in foundation

noun strong matches footing groundwork

root support

do you feel supported? who do you support?

do you feel rooted? who do you root for?