Failure

Failure takes many forms.

It could look something like this.

This.

Or maybe this.

It might rock.

It might chug.

It has the power to shock.

Elevate.

Reveal.

Maybe it's a matter of thinking too precisely on an event-

Adrian: Hello and welcome to the launch of the Institute of Failure.

My name is Adrian Heathfield, and this is Cathy Naden (Forced Entertainment) and Ben Slater; we are the official spokespeople of the Institute.

From this day forward, the Institute of Failure will function as a think tank dedicated to the documentation, study, and theorisation of failure in all aspects of human endeavor. It will exist primarily as a website, with invited contributions and links, and will also present public talks, seminars, and lectures, of which this is the first.

The collaborative overseers of this project, Tim Etchells and Matthew Goulish, unfortunately could not be with us today. Matthew has contributed a paper, which we will present to you shortly. Tim, because of health problems, has been unable to contribute new writing to today’s presentation.

If he were here I imagine that he might tell a story which a friend of ours told him about growing up in the 1980s in Croatia. She said that each year on a particular day in April there was a day of national disaster rehearsal called “Nista Nas Ne Smije Izne-naditi”: Nothing Can Ever Surprise Us. On Nothing Can Ever Surprise Us Day the whole country would be mobilised to pretend that a war or some other catastrophe was happening, each town would have its own rituals, “its nuclear accident, its chemical spillage, its germ or ground warfare” event. Kids would particularly look forward to this day, as they could skip school and participate in an elaborate form of realist dressing up. And then she said, despite all those years of practice, the war came and made the rehearsal look like a cheap pantomime.
(from introduction to the Institute Of Failure)

Perhaps it's a crisis of integrity?

Or pure hubris.

Everything in the known universe about failure (not as extensive as you might think)