BOOK EVENT: The Error is Regretted

The Academy for Media Art Cologne is excited to invite Anita Di Bianco for an event around her book The Error is Regretted / Wir entschuldigen uns für diesen Fehler, which marks the 20-year anniversary of Anita’s project Corrections and Clarifications. For the event she will be joined in conversation by Anna Bromley, contributor to the book and current faculty member of the Art and Media Studies department and Lilian Haberer (Professor for art history in the context of media).

Corrections and Clarifications is an ongoing publication launched in response to the glut of news reporting following September 11, 2001 – an annual edited compilation of daily revisions, retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print, online, and radio news. Each issue is a reverse-chronological catalogue of lapses in naming and classification, of tangled catchphrases, patterns of mis-speech and inflection, connotation and enumeration, a distillation of the predictive patterns and algorithmic amplifications of the last two decades, spanning from the initial deployments of the term 'fake news' to the current reckoning with the attention economy.

The most recent 96-page edition, released in November 2021, comprised English- and German-language news corrections from June 2020 to October 2021 – along with critical texts by Anna Bromley, Florian Wüst and Francesco Gagliardi bound into the volume entitled The Error is Regretted / Wir entschuldigen uns für diesen Fehler.

With this project, Di Bianco offers credit to "… those seekers, processors, middle managers, and ultimate regulators of public information who take it upon themselves (or impose it upon others) to re-name, re-classify, disguise, de-fuse or be de-briefed (…). And ultimately who, regardless of stated intentions, occasionally reveal something, piece by piece, through slips in language and naming systems."

Annual editions of Corrections and Clarifications travel via art book fairs and events, exhibitions, per post, and are passed hand to hand. The project has examined the press in Bosnia, Turkey, Slovenia, as well as diverse geographic areas of English-language, German-language, and Serbo-Croatian-language print news. Previous volumes of Corrections and Clarifications have been produced, exhibited, and distributed in collaboration with KW Berlin, Kunsthaus Zürich, collectorspace Istanbul, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.

Anita Di Bianco’s works in film and print have been exhibited at PS1, the Kunstverein Braunschweig, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, K21 in Düsseldorf, the Kunstverein Salzburg, and Waterside Project Space in London, among others. Corrections and Clarifications, an ongoing project since 2001, is featured on Creative Time's web portal, Creative Time Reports, and has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York. Information about her films, writings, and other projects can be found at www.anitadi.net.

Anna Bromley is an artist, radio producer, and writer. Her installations, re-enactments, and sonic projects have been presented at sites such as nGbK, HKW, and SAVVY Contemporary, all in Berlin; and in the documenta14, the Bergen Assembly, the Tbilisi Architecture Biennale; radioarte di Siena, and beuys2021 | beuysradio, Dusseldorf. Her texts and essays have appeared in springerin, testcard, and in numerous books. She is the author of Quatsch! (AAAAPPPP 2020) and Speak to me (Edition Error, 2022).