/error/

Only for a small moment in time, at the end of the first pandemic year of Covid-19, in times of ‘home office’ and ‘social distancing’ , of sluggish screen work and accelerated digitalization, of video conferences, online lectures and virtual meetings avoiding all personal contact or physical closeness, in times of temporary setups

and breakdowns, of server overload, of transmission errors and time delays, of broken personal links and denied accesses to shared files, Timo Kahlen‘s interactive net art work ‘/ error /’ (2020) marked a critical reflection of our current use of new ‘online’ media: focussing on the susceptibility to errors and to technological failure, and on our personal isolation and loss of control. It was a subtle (and short-lived) generative work of art that could be seen and heard and ‘touched’ only with the mouse cursor (our dominant tool in these times of remote contact) and was, in fact: as frustrating and as difficult to grasp as reality itself.

The conceptual, time-specific work ‘error’ (2020) could be seen only for one day: on December 31, 2020 — before the end of browser support for Flash on January 1, 2021 made it unreadable forever, invisible and inaudible like all of Timo Kahlen’s other works of net art. Four weeks later, all works created by using the Flash program

had virtually disappeared from the web. An offline version of ‘/error/’ was presented to the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, but on the internet itself it left a blank space, an absence.