Jakartass Home thoughts from abroad. Alien thoughts from home.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. 
Albert Einstein

In the lobby of an office tower here in Jakarta, I once observed a yuppie-type guy waiting for an elevator to descend. Like all of us, he had to press the button t call the lift. The problem was, he had two conversations going on his cell pones, one in his left hand and one in his right. Rather than saying, “Hang on a mo…” or “I’ll call you back …”, he contorted himself to press the button with an elbow.

More recently, I’ve seen a Ferrari stuck in a traffic jam; it was so low-slung that it would make a useful stepping stone during the common floods here.

That shopping malls are full of generally empty boutiques selling branded ‘luxury’ goods, passed by, hordes of lower-income folk taking advantage of the mall’s air-conditioning and clean toilets says much about the vacuous nature of Jakarta’s uber-rich.

There are many more examples of the rich having more money than sense.

Artist Jeremy Hutchison recognises this and has found the perfect synthesis: he investigates the mechanisms of the 21st century, plunging a moment of critical reflection into daily life.

He has opened a boutique in London which he calls Erratum. Its products are made by workers around the world who have been asked to insert an error into one of the everyday items they typically produce in bulk and send him their results.

The malformed objects have a disturbing, eerie quality, suggesting an alternative reality, a jarring aberration in the polished, homogenous world of mass-produced goods. They also hint at a possible form of artificial evolution, each mistake suggesting a potential success, a mutation that could evolve to serve a future race.

This one’s for rich kids.