The Beauty of Error
This article was originally published in German. The English version is an automatic translation and may contain errors. The German original is authoritative.
Who doesn't love the smell of an old book? Everyone knows that special scent that hits your nose, slightly sweet and musty, hard to describe. And yet this magic is nothing other than decay. Paper slowly ageing. But we experience it as nostalgia and magic: a scent of history, of something that lives. I believe errors are the heart of the analogue world.
They are not a disturbance, but a small sign that time has passed, that things have been used, worn, touched. The crackle of a vinyl record, the ink blot in the notebook, the dog-ear in your favourite book. Every single error, no matter how small, makes a piece unique. The digital world, by contrast, knows no errors. Files don't age, streams don't crackle, PowerPoint slides don't blur.
The error of perfection
Everything is perfect, available at any time, infinitely reproducible. This perfection is orderly and convenient, but in my view also tedious. It makes our experiences smooth and interchangeable. A song sounds the same today as it will tomorrow. Images smell of nothing. They feel like nothing. None of these things carry a trace of encounter, of time, of us.
And that is precisely where, in my opinion, the error of perfection lies: in digital flawlessness we lose our sense for detail. We no longer see the small things because there are no deviations to draw our attention. We no longer hear the crackle between two pieces of music, we no longer feel the rough surface of photographic paper, we no longer smell the ageing of a book.
Analogue errors, by contrast, are beautiful interruptions. They jolt us out of habit, they make every experience special. The crooked, poor photocopy from the university lecture notes, the dust speck on the overhead transparency, the slight tremor of a chalk line. These are small blemishes, but also invitations to look more closely. In the end, these traces remind us that media are more than just information, but material that lives, just as we do.