The printer is running out of ink and churns out color-washed pastels…
The CD player skips perfectly on beat as the laser violently tracks and re-tracks over a scratch in the last song of your favorite plastic disc, rendering the rock opera a momentarily electronic glitch…
The iPhone conveniently shreds the image of your grandmother, as you attempt to capture that single most perfect moment that will never happen again.
…
Technological errors do happen.
And sometimes they are absolutely gorgeous.
But, I must have looked like a fool—rushing around my old office screaming “don’t touch it… I’ll take care of it”—just to save a single, color, Hewlett-Packard toner-explosion art print that was resting on the edge of the machine. It was like some sort of Hopi sand painting, just waiting for the impermanence of life to blow it away. But I got it. Captured forever in the small window of my digital camera as a personal treasure.
And that is how it happens.
…
The snapshot above was taken graciously by my old iPhone. I say “by” my phone, because (without warning)—under precisely unknown circumstances—it would take chunks of the image and throw it around to the other side. It helped that I hacked into it a few times to enhance it’s utility, but that wasn’t why it happened. In fact there are plenty of these cubism examples all over Flickr …along with many other different experiments that you could try at home too!
The image was just a documentation of some amazing purple light reflected onto the ceiling through the combination of a neon cat sculpture and the built-in hall lamp. Which I suppose is a technology fail of it’s own. Two different types of gases, broadcasting light together and combined to form this radical haze… while my iPhone had it’s own take on the situation.
Double beauty fail.