October 02, 2025, 10 am – 2 pm
Many thanks to Timo Kaabi-Linke from the collective Nadia Kaabi-Linke for his lecture CIRCUIT BENDING, FAILURE, AND FATIGUE — Why Machines Can’t Replace Human Creativity and discussing the works of our participants within the Studio Program at BAI | Berlin Artist Residency, Art School, Arts Incubator, and Live Online Courses & Classes.
“In an era of flawless automation and ever-smarter neural systems, what remains distinctly human? Using Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s Crashed Memories Twenty-Eleven (2023) — a body of images recovered from a physically destroyed hard drive containing documentation from Tunisia after the 2011 uprising — this lecture shows how creativity can emerge precisely at the moment of breakdown. The recovered files are not merely corrupted data: they are accidental compositions made possible by the hard drive’s physical failure and the serendipity of damage. I argue that machines are engineered to avoid error and therefore cannot claim the generative potential that human fatigue, misunderstanding and mistake provide. For machines, failure is often terminal; for humans, it is a resource we can reflect on, reframe, and transform into new directions. Drawing from art history, instances of serendipitous discovery, and the specific case of Crashed Memories, the talk investigates why fragility — not perfection — remains central to artistic invention. Join a discussion that reclaims error as a radical tool for practice and imagination.” (Text by courtesy of Nadia Kaabi-Linke)
More information on the Nadia Kaabi-Linke Website.
