Serendipity

By Crispin Sartwelll

There's a scene in the movie "Pollock" in which Jackson is gearing up to paint one of his fairly

unremarkable quasi-abstractions when he spills a little paint on the canvas. He curses, then looks

at the drips with growing interest. Soon he's tossing paint around like Mitch "Wild Thing"

Williams used to throw a baseball, and a genius, as well as abstract expressionism, is born.

I thought about Pollock as I was reading a piece in *Wired* about a retired security engineer

named Farrell Evans. He was taking pictures with his digital Nikon when he got distracted and

knocked his tripod into a river. After he used extraordinary measures to dry it out - such as

attaching it to his car and driving it around through the desert - it started taking pictures of

ravishing and inexplicable beauty. And suddenly a new art form was invented and the retired

engineer began to mutate into a famous artiste.

What is so remarkable about the work is the colors, which seem to bleed and reconfigure into

something that both creates an image that can be read as an abstract and that shows something

new and inexplicable about the structure of reality, something you always almost already saw.

The word "serendipity" means a surprising and happy confluence of events in which something

good happens by accident. Serendipity has been central to art, to science, to invention, to love: in

short, to life. Most of the best things that happen, as well as most of the worst things that happen,

happen by accident. And many of the great persons of history are famous through no merit of

their own.

Columbus, you may recall, bumped into the new world by mistake.

And even the great revolutions that happened on purpose required a serendipitous confluence

of events. When Martin Luther started blaspheming against the Catholic church, he said little that

John Wycliff and John Hus hadn't said before him. They got strung up as heretics. But the

political and religious situation in which Luther worked was somehow ripe, and pretty soon

Lutheranism was everywhere.

It's nice to know, if you were worried, that technology is perfectly compatible with

serendipity. It might seem that it's easier to find the serendipitous moment when you're pushed

offcourse by the wind because your ship is pretty primitive, or when you have to apply paints by

hand.

But technology in a certain way makes simple operations more and more complex. How a

digital camera takes a photograph is much more complicated than the way light imprints itself on

film. And the more complex artifacts become, the more things can go wrong, because more

factors are interacting.

Thus while we may develop new technologies in order to control the world and one another

more effectively, we really only manage to introduce more complexities. And though certain

operations become easier, they also become ever more fraught with snafus.

But where, we might ask, would we be without screw-ups? In fact new technologies

themselves emerge through accidents, and then by the accidents these technologies introduce, we

experience new beauties.

Indeed, and though Luther would disapprove, we might make a religion of the screw-up. The

world - that greatest of works of art - is a sweet mistake, and essentially everything that happens

in it is an accident. All the beauty that's around us and that we make is impossible without the

arbitrary coincidence.

Indeed you yourself are no doubt accidental, due the happy malfunctioning of birth control

devices or unintentional impregnation in some generation or other among your forebears. This of

course connects us to the universe as a whole: the cosmic accident.