Kenneth Goldsmith proclaims in The Artful Accidents of Google Books that "the book is far from dead: it's returning in forms that few could ever have imagined." The Art of Google Books, a Tumblr that collects strange and unusual errors found in the Google Books Archive, is just one of many examples Goldsmith highlights where these technological errors in systems take on new aesthetic forms.
The many examples of projects created on the basis of these errors was really captivating for me. Why are these errors so interesting? Is it because we think technology is never supposed to mess up? Or because we often confide in technology as if it is a more accurate depiction of life than reality itself? These were just a few questions I asked myself when reading Goldsmith's article and looking through the projects he describes.
Goldsmith suggests that the obsession with digital errors comes from the sense that these errors are on record and that they are permanent. For example, at such a massive scale of scans, Google is never going to go back and fix these errors because there are too many of them in Google Books. It would simply be impossible to do so and therefore, the errors will remain there, waiting for someone to find them like a new age scavenger hunt.
I think what is most interesting about these digital errors though is that they only exist the moment when technology and humanity intersect.
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