Caer dos veces con la misma piedra or how to objectify mistakes

The Spanish version of “stepping twice into the same river” would be "caer dos veces con la misma piedra" (which, literally means “to step twice with the same rock”). In this sentence the word “rock” functions as a sinonym for “mistake” or “error”, so that “to step twice with the same rock” means “to make the same mistake twice”. Considering this, we asked ourselves about the shape of mistakes: How would they look like if they were rocks? We worked with some of the mistakes that characterize the first part of the travel experienced by Don Quijote, the errant knicht par excellence of the Spanish literature, and experimented with translation processes from letters to numbers until we found a way to calculate the difference between expectations and reality or correctness and error. By programming and computing we used these results to turn them into three-dimensional shapes that we 3D-printed. In reference to Don Quijote's mistakes and his travel, we named this project "Las piedras del camino".

In this paper we present the conceptual and technical processes behind "Las piedras del camino" with the aim of discussing whether it could be considered a piece of electronic literature or not.