image from http://404.jodi.org

If time were laid out on a timeline, with one earlier event directing a later event then the emergence of an error, in this neat system of cause and effect, would be relatively predictable. We could see that when A occurs it produces B —– the error. But this is not the way time is, and it is not the way events exist either in our day to day lives or in interaction with a digital system. Events exist, as A.N. Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze tell us, as complexes of occasions, all enfolded in the one event, not as a neatly linear sequence of compartmentalised occasions. B is thus enfolded in A, for B —–the error—–to be brought into existence it must be unfolded from A (Whitehead The Concept of Nature 75). Here I take my starting point from Whitehead’s process philosophy and Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual. These philosophers provide us with a means to understand the event, and, by extrapolating from these thinkers, a means to understand the event of the digital encounter. Once we understand the event through this framework we can begin to examine the place of errors in this system.

Deleuze answers the question “What is an event?” in a short chapter in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, one of the few times that he mentions Whitehead. In this chapter Deleuze, aligns himself with Whitehead’s thought in order to think the event in relation to his own work on the fold (Deleuze 76-82). He credits Whitehead as the philosopher who importantly situated the event as the central constitutive element of reality. The connection between the way in which Deleuze uses the event and Whitehead’s initial categorisation and explanation of the scheme has been cited previously by theorists such as Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine, as well as Steve Shaviro and Tim Clark (Prigogine and Stengers 387-89; Stengers; Shaviro; Clark). For all these thinkers, although there are no one to one correspondences between Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s thought, Whitehead and Deleuze’s ideas work together to produce a mode of thought which takes the virtual elements of the event and the notions of permanence and flux within and between multiplicities as its theoretical ground. In this paper I situate the event of interactive media art within this theoretical framework and attempt to conceptualise the error as the actualisation of unforeseen potential within this system of flux.

Paul Patton’s work on elucidating the Deleuzian event is useful here. Patton points out that Deleuze takes his concept of an event from the Stoics. He points out that the Stoics drew a fundamental distinction between two realms of being, a material realm of bodies and states of affairs, referred to as actual, and an incorporeal realm of events, referred to as the virtual (Patton). For Patton, the Deleuzian events are the “epiphenomena” of corporeal causal interactions: they do not affect bodies and states of affairs but they do affect other events, such as the responses and actions of agents. In other words events are the incorporeal attributes of material bodies. Patton gives the example of being cut with a knife. The fact of ‘being cut’ is neither a property of the flesh nor of the knife, it is rather, as Patton puts it, an attribute or the “interpenetration of bodies” (Patton). Following this, it may be possible that the fact of ‘being errant’ is neither a property of the human nor of the machine but rather an attribute of the condition of their interrelationship. The human and the machine interpenetrate one another in order to affect the state of the error, to bring the error into existence.

– from “The Error and the Event” by Tim Barker. Vector e-zine #6, errors and glitches