T H E - A C C I D E N T - I S S U E

Failure is not a condemnation! It’s not the same thing. Failure is failure. Failure is an accident: art has tripped on the rug. In any case you should not forget my logic of failure, my logic of the accident. In my view, the accident is positive. Why? Because it reveals something important that we would not otherwise be able to perceive. In this respect, it is a profane miracle. What is a miracle? It is a gift brought before the eyes so that one may believe, so that there could be some superior hope. Granted, the accident, in a certain way, is a miracle in reverse. It reveals something absolutely necessary to knowledge. If there were no accident, we would not even begin to imagine the industrial revolution or the revolution in transportation, etc. So please don’t confuse the term failure.
(Paul Virilio »The Accident of Art« 2005)





Download the complete issue as a PDF here

Report from the Dead Zone

– by Andreas Rosenfelder

I wanted to go to the dead zone. I wanted to see if the post-apocalyptic world would look how we imagine it in our most morbid dreams. Whether the ionic fires crackles in the contaminated woods. Whether the gamma rays twinkle over the graveyards of heavy machinery. Chernobyl, it seemed, had to be more than just an ineffable place that our science teachers would reference some 20 years ago.
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In April 1986, we were not supposed to drink fresh milk or eat salad, they explained. They gave us youth literature by Gudrun Pausewang, in which schoolgirls fled from radioactive clouds through endless fields of canola (a boring film was produced 20 years later from the material). In class we learned to fear radiation. I drew the warning signs for radiation onto my satchel, a grinning skull completed my logo.
Now I am standing on the border of the forbidden zone of Chernobyl, in front of Reactor 4, which on April 26th at 1:23 pm was blown apart by an explosion during an experiment with oxyhydrogen. About 100 meters in front of me the sarcophagus’ blue-grey walls, which entomb Reactor 4, gleam in the sunlight.
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The display of the Geiger-meter in my hand climbs to 600-mille roentgen per hour. The casket leaks through cracks and holes, bird’s nest in its innards. Inside the sarcophagus, 185 tons of nuclear fuel, frozen into lava, continue to radiate. Inside the tomb, the body of mechanic Waleri Chodentschuk’s, the first known victim of the accident, which couldn’t be rescued, lies still.
During the three week long aftermath, hundreds of thousands of Soviet conscripts worked on the roof of neighboring Reactor 3, gathering the heavy graphite blocs with their bare hands, trying to throw them into the reactor. German precision robots had failed in attempts to clean the roof covered in radioactive matter. They ventured too close to the edge and fell into the abyss. The radiation burned through their sturdy circuits, rewiring them for suicide. 
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In 1986, Soviet soldiers had to chose between life and death: two years in Afghanistan or two minutes on the roof of aforementioned reactor. In the images taken by daredevil photographer Igor Kostin, you see the callous, almost mocking stares of the soldiers protected merely by thin Kevlar jackets from WWII. The mysterious calm of these liquidators, some say, is inherent in Eurasian culture. They accept their own fate.
The dead zone surrounding the reactor, which was drawn with compasses onto the map by the military, cast a magical spell on people, even those who met their death in the moments after the explosion. Fire brigades recalled cesium glinting in the sunshine like beautiful crystals. Farmer’s wives reported they’d plucked strontium from their beet plants as if they were rare black petals. Of course radiation itself is invisible. Only on the Super 8 footage of a wedding, shot one day later not far from the catastrophe, were peculiar white specks from the gamma rays interfering with the film distinguishable. Fishermen returned from the riverbanks with a deep tan, although summer was a long way off.
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Myths began creeping around the zone like poison ivy only days after the incident. Wolves howled in despair, gathering on the concrete-covered mass graves for pets, which were executed by special military units in the aftermath. They must have felt the warmth of decay. Rumors spread about hedgehogs without spikes, three-headed birds and red rats, which at night gnawed drunken people to their bones. The more profound than the biological mutations was the aesthetic metamorphosis: the forbidden area instantly became a parallel world where everything looked familiar, but at the same time had mutated at the core.
A heavy blanket of snow covers the area. Our white VW bus stops at a junction overlooking oblong hills. A whole kolkhoz is buried under the hills: the houses, the machinery even the earth itself. On top of these grave-mounds the radiation comes up to 50.000 micro roentgen. “Snow swallows beta radiation,” Maxim, our guide from Interinform-Centre informs me, “but not the gamma rays.” Gamma rays eat their way through matter like little needles. If you stood on those graveyards, you would be riddled by an invisible blaze of gunfire.
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After Chernobyl, Europe was charged with radiation phobia. Fear penetrated everything. But there is another opposing force, a peculiar kind of magnetism. Chernobyl’s remaining aesthetic radiation may be more dangerous and powerful than the actual radiation. Chernobyl projects, like no other place, a collective yearning for a parallel world, a desire only satisfied with the confines of a cinema, while watching films like Blade Runner.
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As we pass the “Red Forest”, an evergreen wood that was colored red overnight by fallout, we reach the pinnacle of radiation, located right next to a flame cast in concrete: the logo of the power station. Outside of our car, Maxim declares proudly the radiation has now reached 3000 micro roentgens. Inside the car the dosimeter reads only 420. It seems as if we’re navigating microwaves in a spaceship. Out there, the air must burn like fire.
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Some seared pine stems and young birches grow where the Red Forest used to be. Behind a wall of fog, I can vaguely make out the silhouette of the military camp “Chernobyl 2”: a 150m tall Radio antenna broadcasting out-of-control conspiracy theories. Rumor has it the Soviets used the antenna for mind-control tests on the reactor operators before the catastrophe and, by accident, altered their judgment.
Endless power lines slice the steppe of the death zone. A genuine eagle swoops across them. In this noble moment, Tarkowski should spring to mind. His elegiac 1979 movie Stalker is also set in a mysterious forbidden area.
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The forbidden city Pripyat – wrapped in barbed wire and guarded by military since the incident – resonates a defining silence. The depopulated concrete desert, built in 1970 for and by young engineers and their families feels like a bizarre mix of Beirut, East-Berlin today. Anatoli Fradis, a Hollywood producer with Ukrainian roots shot the trailer to the zombie movie “Necropolis” here. And even if the film was a total disaster, it is hard to imagine a more appropriate setting for a zombie movie.
In 1986 Pripryat had 50.000 inhabitants; the average age was 26. You don’t need panels about rural exodus or studies about changing demographics to get a taste of our future. The amusement park in the center, scheduled for inauguration on May 1st 1986, is considered particularly contaminated. A helicopter crashed between the bumper carts and the ferris wheel in an attempt to put out the fire in the reactor with sand. Maxim strides through the territory with self-assured calm and finds fresh wolf traces in the snow. The plutonium isotopes will continue to radiate here for another 40.000 years.
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I wanted to find out what radiation really is. I got a dosimeter with a digital display, nothing glittered. I felt a faint crackle in my throat and realized to my relief that I had had it in the morning when I left the hotel. Nevertheless all these ridiculous thoughts cross my mind the tales of mutations from comic books and movies. Will I turn into a green hulk? Or shrink like “Grant Williams in the 1957 movie “The Incredible Shrinking Man? Maxim leads me to a dosimeter in the information center. The machine looks like a cheap and stupid fortune-tellers apparatus on a provincial fair. When I put my hands onto the contact interface the display lights it’s green light. “This machine is very sensitive” Maxim smiles when he sees my face clouded in doubt. “It is 20 years old and works perfectly.” I was in the death zone. I am not contaminated.   ◊

Motorcycle Helmets

For daredevil motorcyclists the helmet is more than just a placebo sense of safety – it’s also a role-play prop with kinky connotations. Think of the oxygen mask drill in an airplane. When the masks drop, it’s green light for mouth-to-mouth with death, but the flight attendants perform their ritual anyway. It’s just like the pool of holy water in a catholic church: you wouldn’t go without it, but at the end of your life you’ll die anyways. – by Eva Munz

Safety measures are rarely sexy; helmets have always begged for design. Chanel did some, as did Louis Vuitton a couple of years back. Stunt drivers have no time for this kind of kitsch. The Bandit Helmets we used for the DERZEIT Accident Issue’s fashion shoot cater to the very needs of speed freaks on two wheels. Their heavily adorned hats are carefully cast characters that show the ›face‹ they want to put on for the ride. They’re irreplaceably personal, like the parachute that every parachutist packs himself, so when the fabric fails to unfold they have no one to blame but themselves. Every rider knows that if a helmet drops on a concrete floor from the hip, its protection may be gone forever, gripped invisibly by an evil spell. 
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The Berlin-based company customizes helmets with airbrush designs and also offers prêt-a-porter models with see-through grid textures, ornaments, dipped in flashy chrome or shaped like bizarro ghostlike masks. Helmets offer a great opportunity to identify with your tribe. Harley Davidson riders know this, as do Vespa Mods and Bangkok’s motorcycle-taxi drivers. Personally, I think men on motorcycles are always kind of lame: nothing beats a hot chick on wheels.
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Helmets GmbH, Roentgenstr. 14a, 10587 Berlin, www.motorbike.de

Helen DeWitt

Helen DeWitt published The Last Samurai in 2000, and some time later, moved to Berlin. Her new book, Your Name Here, 580 pages co-authored by DeWitt and the journalist Ilya Gridneff, is being digitally distributed: the longest PDF I’ve ever downloaded. It’s about Arabic, luck, airplanes and disappearance. And reading, always reading. Dewitt’s blog, Paperpools, is subtitled »Lies, damn lies and statistics (especially statistics)«. 

As a component of the DERZEIT Accident Issue, I interviewed Dewitt via email about her views on risk and gambling. – by Emily Segal

Emily Segal wrote:
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Dear Helen DeWitt,
I’m Emily, the managing editor of DERZEIT, a newsprint magazine out of Berlin and the official publication for Mercedes-Benz Berlin Fashion Week.
I am also an enormous admirer of your writing. I’m currently wedged into the first chunk of Your Name Here (I realize I’m reading a copy pirated from my friend and should paypal you some cash). To take some unnecessary credit, I was the first of my friends at school to read The Last Samurai and proselytize madly, thus starting a little knot of you-obsessives.
I would love nothing more than to interview you for one of our next issues, coming out during this next Berlin Fashion Week, Jan. 20.–23.
Basically the idea of the magazine is to take the most commercial form possible – essentially a trade publication, funded by a huge car company – and use it as a trojan horse for whatever weirdo texts we’d like to publish, or those that could possibly be used to gloss the reading of fashion / spectacle / and / or Berlin. (We started from scratch last July as a small team, managed to get funded by Mercedes-Benz, and put out four issues over the course of four days. Here’s our site, which is pretty bare, and a write up the New York Times T Moment blog did on us.
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Last year, the issues were centered around architecture / art / design / fashion, but this year it’s origin / structure / accident / prognosis. I’m really digging Lotteryland () and I think for the accident issue it could be cool to talk about luck, forecasts, the gambler’s fallacy, games, whatever--
or we could talk about none of these things, and that would be cool too.
I’m sure you’re super busy, but email, skype, phone or meeting in person in Berlin (any time between tuesday and january 20th) would all work for an interview.
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Let me know!
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Looking forward to hearing from you,
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Emily
 
EMILY SEGAL: When did your interest in statistics start, and how?
HELEN DE WITT: A friend who started out as a mathematician before switching to Classics said he thought it would be interesting to see a book that showed the way mathematicians think. He gave an example of the way mathematical vagueness misleads people.
Suppose we’re told a DNA test is highly accurate: there’s only a 1 in a million chance that traces of blood left on a corpse will match the DNA of someone who was not involved. Someone is found whose DNA matches that of the test – someone for whom there is no other evidence of involvement. Can we be confident that X was the murderer? Well, no. If there are 65 million people in Britain (that may not be the correct figure), we can expect 65 people to match the sample – there’s only a 1 in 65 chance that X is the guilty one.

Where has it taken you?
I started reading around – one of the first books I read was Gerd Gigerenzer’s Reckoning with Risk, which talks about how humans are bad at working out probability if given percentages, do better when a problem is set out in terms of frequencies. The thing that’s interesting is that probability is counter-intuitive – our sense of how likely something is turns out to be highly unreliable. But fiction, after all, works partly by presenting individuals and events which the reader perceives as normal, unsurprising, or, perhaps, as exceptional, highly unusual. Since most writers of fiction have no background in probability or statistics, they tend to replicate the misconceptions of the untrained reader. I wondered whether there was a way to present statistical ways of thinking without using complicated equations, which many readers would not be able to follow. It seemed to me that one might be able to do this using the techniques in information design of Edward Tufte; one might be able to use the methods of Isotype developed by Otto Neurath beginning in the 1920s. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do.
I haven’t thought so much about deliberate deceit. It’s possible to mislead using statistics, but it’s very common for people to mislead because they themselves don’t have enough data, or have data but don’t know how to interpret what they have.

A lot of Your Name Here is in the form of an email exchange. What did you think of emails when you first started sending them? What platform did you use?
Before emails came on the scene I thought I was a bad correspondent. I would get a Christmas present, start 20 drafts of a thank-you letter, and finally write and send something 10 years later. I also have a horror of the phone, so I had virtually no contact with family and absent friends. Then I worked in an office from which emails could be sent; started writing to my ex-husband David. Wrote hundreds, thousands of emails. Fabulous. I can’t remember what platform the office used. Went on to Eudora after a while. Now I’m on Thunderbird.

One of your characters mentions reading 900 words per minute. So, speed reading, can you, how fast? I like youtube videos of people learning to speed read because of the way they touch their paper – it looks pious.
No, I can’t do that; the friend who got me interested in statistics reads that fast. He is a bad influence, probably: he read YNH at a single sitting, and it didn’t strike him as particularly long or complex, but I gather other readers have had more trouble.

Let’s talk about Lotteryland. Can you trace your writing about the lottery to any particular starting point for you or in your work?
Lotteryland was originally a self-contained book in its own right which I wrote in 1999. (It got interrupted when I got an offer of publication for The Last Samurai, so it never got finished; it seemed as though it might be better to use some of it as a book within a book in Your Name Here. I do wonder, though, whether it doesn’t just make the structure impossibly complicated.)
I started thinking about it when Britain introduced the National Lottery. Before the Lottery there was an investment scheme called Premium Bonds which gave participants the chance to win a million pounds: you had to buy a minimum of 100 Premium Bonds for Ł1 apiece, you were assigned 100 numbers, and your numbers went into the draw every week. You could get your Ł100 back at any time. You could leave them going into the draw for years. You could buy up to Ł20,000. In other words, you were gambling the interest you could otherwise have earned if you had left that Ł100 in a bank. When they brought in the Lottery, they reduced the frequency of draws in Premium Bonds to once a month. They also promoted the Lottery very heavily – it was widely advertised, tickets could be bought over the counter in newsagents, people could pick their own numbers. So it was much more entertaining, but you were almost certain, not just not to win, but to lose the money you put in. That was interesting in itself, and also seemed to be connected to other things that were going on in Britain at the time.

In terms of the lottery, aren’t you basically always guaranteed not to win?
No, you are guaranteed an extremely remote chance of winning.
You’re gambling on your perception of odds, or of an emotional distortion of odds. I was just in Vegas, where I thought a lot about the idea that the more you play, the more times you pull the lever on the slot machine, the better your chances are (ignoring that your chances are always the same).
Er, I think I would have said the more you play the more money you are likely to lose.
 
Would you call fashion (/costume/uniforms) a game?
I think I would see fashion as ludic, which is perhaps not quite the same thing. The types of clothing you mention involve quite different practices: dress as costume happily admits to the ludic, dress as uniform purports to mark compliance with the requirements of a task, the formalized constraints of a particular place int he social order.
 
You make me think of this quote from the Swiss writer Robert Walser: »We wear uniforms. Now, the wearing of uniforms simultaneously humiliates and exalts us. We look like unfree people, and that is possibly a disgrace, but we also look nice in our uniforms, and that sets us apart from the deep disgrace of those people who walk around in their very own clothes but in torn and dirty ones. To me, for instance, wearing a uniform is very pleasant because I never did know, before, what clothes to put on. But in this, too, I am a mystery to myself for the time being.«
That’s awfully nice. I used to look at those ads for Benetton and think they were playing at radicalism (and now that game is all too familiar). If you walk into a Benetton store there are these arrays of sweaters; a handful of styles, dozens of colors. Saussure says language is a system of differences; Benetton offered the differences, but no one had used them to create a language. So the signifiers are just there for the asking, and if you wanted to you could create a system of signifieds and deploy – the signified (an array of desires) is not given, you could select any range of objects of desire you liked. So you could use an array of sweaters to create a system of signals that did not exist. A company with its sweaters could devise this, or the people who walk in off the streets could appropriate. One only sees the range of possibilities if one sets out different possible systems of signifieds.
 
When and why did you move to Berlin?
I went in September 2004 after a bad time in New York. A London friend, the painter Ingrid Kerma, has an apartment in Kreuzberg, in Naunynstrasse; she said I could stay there a month. It was very good being there – very quiet, no people to deal with – so I thought if I found a short-term rental in Tip or Zitty I could finish a book. I found a place for 3 months in Mehringdamm; hadn’t finished my book so took a place for 5 months in Kurfurstenstrasse; found another short-term let (all this time, unfortunately, there were all kinds of business problems to deal with); sublet a place in Hornstrasse and finally took over the lease. I’ve never really mastered the art of living with Kohlheizung, though, so I think I’ll have to find something else. 

What do you think about hair dye?
Hm. When I got to Berlin I would go to this or that Frisür with the idea of having some highlights, and the hairdressers would try to persuade me to include brown highlights as looking more natural. Every time I would get dragged into a discussion of the Natural. I slightly felt that the Natural could be mine without recourse to a hairdresser, by the simple expedient of leaving the hair to its own devices. My German is not really up to discussions of the Natural and the Artificial, though, let alone the Natural as understood by early 21st century German hairdressers.   ◊