Error, Ambiguity, and Creativity

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

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2. Introduction

   • Sarah Whatley

   Pages 1-8

3. Creative Thought-Spaces Nested in Ambiguity

   • Efva Lilja

   Pages 9-20

4. Tactical Ambiguity: Materiality, Representation and Interaction in Evan Meaney’s Glitched Portraits

   • Vendela Grundell Gachoud

   Pages 21-41

5. Ambiguity in Psychology

   • Jon May

   Pages 43-62

6. Art of the Accident

   • Ruth Gibson, Bruno Martelli

   Pages 63-84

7. Beyond Error: Philosophy of Indeterminacy in the Age of Algorithms

   • Jaime del Val

   Pages 85-106

8. ‘Queer, Wonderful Misunderstandings’: Catachresis as Aesthetic in Contemporary Poetry

   • Callie Gardner

   Pages 107-125

9. Medical Error: A Misnomer?

   • Rory O’Connor

   Pages 127-136

10. On Counter-Mapping and Media-Flânerie: Artistic Strategies in the Age of Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Street View

    • Emilio Vavarella

    Pages 137-166

11. Perhaps This Cannot Be Anything (on Exercises in Text Production and Critical Typography, Which Make Use of Machine-Made Errors in Processes of Visual and Semantic Translation)

    • Paul Wilson

    Pages 167-186

12. Error as Music Composition: Human and Material Agencies

    • Scott McLaughlin

    Pages 187-210

13. Crashing Creatively: Trial and Error in the Hip Hop Battle

    • Sherril Dodds

    Pages 211-233

14. Written in Error: Definitions and Methods for Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Research

    • Sarah Whatley

    Pages 235-240

15. Back Matter

    Pages 241-247

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This book offers a set of eleven discipline-specific chapters from across the arts, humanities, psychology, and medicine. Each contributor considers the creative potential of error and/or ambiguity, defining these terms in the particular context of that discipline and exploring their values and applications. Themes include error in choreography, poetry, media art, healthcare, psychology, critical typography and mixed reality performance. The book emerges from a core question of how dance research and HCI can inform each other through consideration of error, ambiguity and ‘messiness’ as methodological tools. The digital age had heralded the possibility that error could be eradicated by the logic of computers but several chapters focus on glitch in arts practices that exploit errors in computer programmes, or even create programmes specifically to produce errors. Together, the chapters explore how error can take us somewhere different or somewhere new, to develop a new, more interesting way of working. 

• Error as a creative tool
• Error Network project
• Ambiguity
• Creative potential
• Arts
• Humanities
• Social sciences
• Engineering
• Medicine
• Post-digital age
• Glitch music
• Operational logic
• Interdisciplinary reader

• University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

  Sita Popat

• Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, Coventry, UK

  Sarah Whatley

Sita Popat is Professor of Performance and Technology at the University of Leeds, UK.  Her research lies at the interface between body and technology, with a particular interest in digital avatars and virtual worlds. She is author of Invisible Connections: Dance, Choreography and Internet Communities (2006) and co-editor with Nicolas Salazar Sutil of Digital Movement: Essays in Motion Technology and Performance (2015). 


Sarah Whatley is Professor and Director of the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University, UK. Her research interests include dance and new technologies, dance analysis, somatic dance practice and pedagogy, and inclusive dance practices. She is co-editor of Digital Echoes: Spaces for Intangible and Performance-based Cultural Heritage (2018) and is editor of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices.