LOL so I was looking at the program schedule again because I totally forgot what I'm supposed to write about on fridays, only to realize that I don't have anything listed for fridays, but I do have thursday listed twice. What's interesting is that the choice to make friday the film day was defintely based on the alliteration thing I was going for??? So in my head I defintely meant to write film fridays. But nonetheless, the post reads film thursday immediately below theory thursday. That's the post, and it's been up a whole week now. No changing it now!
I think this is an interesting opportunity to think about error and accidents. If you've read through this blog before, you've probably noticed typos and some words that are hilariously mispelled (one of the cool things about writing in HTML is that it has absolutely no spell check). I just looked back at the pluribus post and realized that the entire first paragrpah is missing. One post randomly got lost and clicking it brings you to a 404pg and I have no idea why (It was because I must have changed the title of the file at one point w/o changing the link lol - that I fixed!). It's not just here, though. I make a lot of dumb mistakes at work, which is crazy because my job is really easy. I also say a lot of dumb shit sometimes, just generaly, as I'm sure we all do.
I'm not trying to beat myself up right now, I promise lol. I'm coming at this from a place of conceptual intrigue. I had fun reading Legacy Russell's book Glitch Feminism last year, which posits on a larger scale that instances of error ('glitches') are moments where we fail to fit into the categories assingned to us, and can be reframed as acts of resistance or a site of identity formation.
"Errors are fantastic in this way, as often they skirt control, being difficult to replicate and therefore difficult to reproduce for the sake of troubleshooting them out of existence. Errors bring new movement into static space; this motion makes an error difficult to see but its interference ever present. Decolonizing the binary body requires us to remain in perpetual motion; accidental bodies that, in their error, refuse definition and, as such, defy language. Forcing the failure of words, we become impossible. Impossible. we cannot be named. What is a body without a name? An error" (Glitch Feminism)
I have to relate the funny thing that just happened: While working on this, I copied everything and then deleted it (I do that sometimes when I want to look at the preview quickly, then take it down). For some reason, Neocites didn't let me paste it all back for a second after I clicked save, and I thought I didn't actually copy it and unintentionally deleted the whole post :o How fucking funny would that have been? Luckily, I did copy it so you're still getting something from me today lol.
I defintiely agree that errors always reveal something. That this blog is riddled with them isn't a big mystery - even after all this time it's a pretty unfamiliar and ridgid enviorment for me. I somehow got this shoddy format together and have been copy and pasting ever since. More generally, though, the constant overstimulation we experience detaches us from our bodies and constantly shifts our focus. Reading Burroughs and McLuhan theorize about electronic media's all-out assult on the human nervous system felt really relevant here, although I couldn't find anything rn that delt with the meaning of error directly in the was that Russell does. I do wonder about the utopian potential of error, though, like how widely applicable it could be irl.
hmmmmm how can I tie this to a movie for the sake of a theme??? lol I feel like it shouldn't be hard to think of an accident-prone film chracter. That's like a trope?? The first one that comes to mind is Linguini from Ratatouille, the sous-chef that's so bad at his job that he needs a rat to bail him out. Peak pixar.
try your best,
- v0id
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