ERROR! workshop
On May 21, Christopher O’Neill and Mardi Reardon-Smith hosted a workshop on ERROR! with the support of the ETLab and Centre for Automated Decison Making + Society.
We were joined by around 20 scholars from media studies, STS, anthropology and more to investigate the status of error in digital technology and explore how error can help us to reframe and sharpen an analysis of contemporary digital power and how it is experienced by people.
We asked participants to hold in mind two questions: what is it that error ‘does’? and what is it that we can ‘do’ with error? Beginning the day with an excellent keynote from USC’s Mike Ananny, our participants then explored the changing nature of error across a range of disparate yet resonant contexts, including commercial drone delivery, parliamentary speech transcripts, biometric sensing, Italian brainrot, rent-tech, infantile home robots, and romantic relationships with AI companions, among others.