Last year I started another strange collection. I began to look out for instances of what I thought of as ‘digital bathos’.
That is: moments where a customer-facing digital display fails to have the desired effect, with mildly comic results.
Misaligned and glitching messages on public transport always brought a weird satisfaction. Then I began to pay more attention to similar issues in retail spaces and the urban environment.
There was treasure to be found. Portrait-oriented screens displaying information to shoppers in landscape format. Digital billboards pleading with passing cars to restart the computer.
I stumbled on my favourite example of this phenomenon in the most unlikely place of all: a magical forest.
Trouble in the fairy glade
My family had bought tickets to enjoy a mile-long ‘illuminated light trail’ through Sandringham woods. It was all very artfully done and highly Instagrammable, in spite of the chill and unceasing December drizzle.
There were majestic oaks wreathed in coloured lights, lifelike projections on wooden statuary, gentle ambient musical cues, and a sea of bulbs that sent waves of undulating colour across the fields.
One section of the trail went through a clearing in which the tree branches were hung with ornate birdcages.
Thanks to the magic of technology, each of these little enclosures appeared to house a winged fairy. They hovered in the air and darted around, leaving trails of magical dust behind them.
Except one birdcage, which seemed to house… an iPad lying on its side. The home screen glowed incongruously in the magical glade.
It was immediately clear that the fairy magic had been achieved using an updated version of the Pepper’s Ghost technique.
The looped fairy animations were played on a tablet in the floor of the birdcage. A plate of glass set at 45 degree angle in the interior then reflected the animation to the beguiled families passing through.
This became my most treasured instance of digital bathos: the suspension of disbelief curtailed by the image of a caged tablet computer.
You could trust the 160-year-old theatrical technique but not the cutting-edge technology.
Tumbling down the stairs
Errors such as these don’t feel like glitches in the matrix. They feel reassuring, like a misspelling on a pub chalkboard, or a road marking that’s been carelessly and comically applied.
Display-screen failures delight me, not for reasons of schadenfreude, but because they provide some reassurance. Maybe the steady digitisation of our physical spaces isn’t going quite as seamlessly as anticipated.
Sure, none of this makes up for the monopolisation of the digital economy by five implacable tech giants. Or the election interference. Or the data breaches. Or the cyberattacks. Or the toxicity of social media platforms. Or tech-assisted burnout.
This is just the march of digital progress being momentarily stalled. It’s the reason why people revelled when they saw ASIMO struggling with a set of stairs.
In factEvery time I add another instance to my collection, it’s a satisfying inversion of Honda’s 2003 advertising slogan.
Isn’t it nice when things just… don’t work?
