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On the morning of March 11th 1944, during the Second World War, the city of Padua, Northern Italy, was heavy bombed by the Allied forces. The target of the raid was the train station, that is near the Scrovegni Chapel and its Giotto’s frescoes. Its walls were only slightly shaken by the 300 tons of explosive sent from the aircraft.

 

The frescoes by Giotto came out unscathed. A few hundred meters away, however, four bombs hit the Gothic Church of the Eremitani, destroying the facade and part of the roof. To the right of the apse, the chapel Ovetari and the cycle of frescoes by Andrea Mantegna which decorated the walls were reduced to rubble. Only two scenes, previously detached, and a few fragmets did survive.

 

In her book “The Venus fixers,” the journalist Ilaria Dagnini Brey (she was born in Padua, but resides in New York) writes that, years after that tragic event, the American lieutenant Frederick Hartt would have said the bombing of the church was a mistake: an unexpected gust of wind would have pushed the bombs on the church rather than the station, causing the disaster.

 

Remembering that fact, today it is worth focusing on the category of error, and in particular on the error in technique and technology. Our society is in point of fact governed by these two disciplines. Algorithms, for example, govern the stock exchange, the hospitals, the search engines on the web, the emergency systems in case of tsunamis, earthquakes and other disasters. A small error in their operation or in their programming may seriously affect the lives of millions of people.

Many artists have recently used the error as a poetic tool, such as Wade Guyton or Taryn Simon (to be continued)…

July 15, 2015