Aesthetics of Serendipity: Muta-Morphosis

Abstract

Creativity is stochastic and assumptive in nature. The importance of randomness in the creative process must not be ignored, underestimated, or intentionally disregarded in a condescending way. Notions of chance, randomness, or unpredictability are important, especially when it comes to artistic creation. In addition to these notions, serendipity can be seen as the expected contribution for making expedient discoveries by coincidence or by chance. To put serendipity into work, a need exists to accumulate a list of questions that need solving, acquaintance with already existing answers, and their use in daily life. Only when this knowledge is present, ‘chance’ can take its part in establishing the perfect milieu for the ‘problem’ and the ‘solution’ to find each other. If there is a great deal of knowledge accrued about the problem and the requisites for the solution, chance adds the final piece to the puzzle. Traditional ‘prescriptive, authoritarian and rather conventional’ aesthetics vs. a new ‘generative, irregular, unprescribed’ aesthetics can then be examined.