Fault Tactical Network

Fault Tactical Network is a temporary convergence of artists across media responding to the
theme of mis-performance through a creative exploration of the error potential in reading, writing,
performing and digital arts practice. We are a spontaneous collective or provisional community who
have worked remotely and for three days physically towards a new work for this occasion. The
members of this first international installment of Fault Tactical Network are 3-d artist and animator,
Claudia Hart, interdisciplinary and new media poet, cris cheek, performance-based and electronic
writer, Jerome Fletcher, Live Artist, Mark Jeffery, and myself, Judd Morrissey, a digital artist and
writer. With us tonight is also Berlin-based dancer-performer, Lito Walkey, who has graciously agreed
to be our referee.

We start with the word error. Error has important implications in any number of areas including literary practices, speech and communication, biology and evolution, computation, and cybernetics. An error may resemble an outright mistake, but may also represent a mutation or accident that triggers learning, evolutionary growth, or a significant shift in cognition. The French writer Helene Cixous:

Error is not lie, it is approximation. Signs that we are on the right track.

and

How do I recognize error? It is obvious, like truth. Who tells me? My body.

These quotes discuss error as a condition. And what about error-making as an aesthetic or generative device for performative, compositional and reading practices? Where can this mislead us? Can we feel it in our real and virtual bodies? Fault Tactical Network explores erroneous performativity through a live installation that merges the living body, textual archives, machine- enhanced / machine-degraded writing, and virtual bodies. The event is an investigation into how accidents can be expressed across
mediums and in avatar vs human form.

program Note #1: Why pulverized poem? (or Nikola Tesla falls in love with a pigeon)

Fault Tactical Network enacts the question: why pulverized poem? This phrase appears in the poem,
The Library is On Fire, by the French poet René Char. Char’s poem responds to a transforming experience he had as a member of the French Resistance. In an essay on this subject, Mary Walling Blackburn cites the following from poet and translator Christopher Merritt:

“The Library is on Fire. These were the code words [during the German occupation
of France] for a parachute drop to the Cereste maquis of the French Resistance —
words that acquired a mysterious life when one of the containers exploded and set
fire to the forest, alerting the Gestapo to the position of René Char’s group. The
Frenchmen barely escaped with their lives. And the poet thought the fire was proof
of the power of language to shape the world. ‘I believe in the magic and in the
authority of words,’ he told his superiors in London, insisting the code be changed.”

What are the implications of Char’s astounding (mis)reading of this episode? The poem is used as
to derive our performance’s score and as a source for responsive text, performance and image-making.
Char’s vision of language is also considered in relation to computer code (literally, executable
language), networks, and other contemporary sites for the misfiring of language.

A local digression: Nikola Tesla, the Serbian Croatian inventor, had the extraordinary hallucinatory
ability to envision ‘before his eyes” every detail of his potential machines in advance of building them.
He contrasted his somewhat inhuman error-proof method of building and thoroughly testing in the
mind’s eye to his rival Thomas Edison whom he viewed as blindly bound to trial and error and the
failures of American common sense. Occasionally a bird, born in captivity, will mistake a human hand
and more rarely an animate object for its mother. This is an error of “imprinting”, the term used for the
genetic ability to recognize a member of one’s own species. Nikola Tesla (known to be celibate) while
not guilty of this particular genetic flaw, did, towards the end of his life, fall in love with a pigeon. He
confessed: “Yes, I loved that pigeon, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me.” Tesla
nursed the pigeon when it was ill, and misread, correctly as it turned out, in her demise, the end of his
life’s work.

From Wikipedia:
One night as he was lying in bed, she flew in through the window and he knew right away that she had something important to tell him: she was dying. “And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes - powerful beams of light”. “…Yes,” “…it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.”

…when that particular pigeon died, something went out of his life. Before that time, he could complete the most ambitious programs he could ever dream of but after the pigeon flew into the beyond, he knew his life’s work was done for good.

Program note #2: Fault Tolerance and Tactics

The name Fault Tactical Network is derived from the concept of “Fault Tolerance”, used
to describe computer networks that fundamentally accept the inevitability of errors. In particular, a computer network like the internet must continue to operate should one of its many nodes become damaged or go offline. We were interested in the playful replacement of the word “tolerance” with “tactics.” In contrast to the computational view of fault tolerance in which the message must survive the hidden damage in a system, the “faults”, accidents and ruptures would be foregrounded and exploited in our work for psI.

However, the fault tolerance of our spontaneous network was tested when one of our participants,
Fiona Wright, injured her ankle in a movement-based work a few days ago and was unable to make the
trip. We had constructed a very precise score for our live installation that, as you will see, involves
simultaneous performances based on temporal constraints. We used Rene Char’s words: “why
pulverized poem?” as a constraint for our piece, with each participant creating one minute of material
for each of the letters in the question. Each artist created three sections of material, corresponding to
the three words in the question (a 3 minute section corresponding to the word why, a 10 minute
section corresponding to the word pulverized, and a five minute section corresponding to the word
poem and including the question mark). The sections were then juxtaposed, remixed, and repeated
according to a mathematically precise system. Without going into detail, the unfortunate
announcement that Fiona wasn’t coming brought with it the realization that the system we had created
could not easily survive the absence of a node on our network (that node being Fiona), a demanding
last-minute lesson in both handling absence and in constructing a truly fault tolerant network. We ask
you, periodically throughout the performance, to imagine our missing node, Fiona Wright, a British Live
Artist in a shiny blue dress.

program note #3: Poli is a human gene

In creating work for the site of this conference and the particular space we were given, we considered
architectural aspects of the room we are in, which has the name POLI. In researching the word poli, we
discovered that poli or pol-iota, is also the name for a human gene, specifically a polymerase involved
in the process of dna-replication. Interestingly, polymerase poli, relates specifically to the theme of
error, its main task being one of proofreading, locating and repairing errors in the copying of dna. When
we arrived, we saw that Poli is spelled with an i in the program but a y (poly) on various signs. While at
first worried about having made a potential mistake, we became interested in the double connotations
in the two spellings of POLI. Poly, as a prefix meaning many, as in polymorphous or polyattentive, or
polymerase, and poli, as in a genetic error, proofreading.

We see this performance as a live installation consisting of 90 minutes of performance that will
transition into an exhibition of our materials.

Thank you to psI for inviting us, all who have helped us, and for support from the Illinois Arts council.
Finally, each of the artists have provided me with helpful keywords in place of traditional bios. After I
recite this keywords in connection with our authors, we will begin.

cris cheek:
how
are
we
reading
now

claudia hart: digital bodies uncanny divide virtual sex

Jerome Fletcher: Misincorporations, Mispronouncing X Y co-ordinates, Proofreading X Y chromosomes

Judd Morrissey: polymorphous leaps in the night

Mark Jeffery: dancing with whip-poor-will