How Mistakes and Strange Pairings Power Creativity

On what happens when otherwise mundane, familiar items are placed together – in museum displays, encyclopaedias, and other strange situations – and what these relationships reveal.

It’s been observed that the proverbial road to Hell is littered with the best intentions of those who follow its path; similarly, chaos is so often the outcome of our efforts to put things in order. According to the Genesis myth, the world began with a primitive taxonomy of created entities (day separated from night, water from earth, beasts of the sky from beasts of the land, man from woman), but that order descended quickly and repeatedly into chaos. Humanity was given the gift of its own existence, and we left the packaging strewn around and the box tipped open to satisfy our perpetual Pandoric urge.

The lesson many have taken from such myths is that we as a species ought to stop screwing things up, but we might instead observe a truism that we can learn to work around and with: that there is no order without chaos. Or, that order itself invents chaos. If we want the one, we must do our best with the other. And there are forms of chaos – of mess, disorder, and inadvertent consequenc…