Copy Copy Copy X Error = Novelty (sometimes)

One of the hardest things for people to grasp, when I talk about the primacy of Copying in creating novelty, is the way that error – particularly the error created by mis-copying – is good.

Error (or variation, if that makes you feel better) is the way that new things come from old.

Sometimes the new that copying error creates is nonsense – like so much genetic ‘junk’ or mutation – but sometimes it’s the thing you are looking for.

So, if you take another language you barely know and copy it over into yours, you can easily make nonsense that might just – now and again – suggest something new.

Japanese english language  t-shirts are great examples of this. K-popstar has collected some great examples

 

Some are just plain nonsense, but some start to point to something interesting. I particularly like this fella:

If you half close your eyes and try really hard, this starts to make sense.

[actually it reminds me of Russell Davies’ recent comments about how advertising straplines are becoming more and more weird, more like the product of a random streamline generator than the human mind – “Be more dog” “Taste the feeling” (or “Feel the Taste” if you live in Spain)].

But it’s not one-way: the West’s love of tattoos and Asian calligraphy have created the opportunity for rather more permanent errors. Hanzismatter has a great archive of oddities in this field. Here’s two of my favourites: “toilet demon” and “field of excess and chaos”

 

Of course, it’s easy to laugh at both of these phenomena – easy to patronise both the buyer and the designer, the inked and the tattooist. But both show how copying can create error and the basis of new stuff. Some of it – like all products of creativity – is a bit “meh”, but some of it the start of something genuinely new.

This is precisely what my chum Laura Jordan Bambach of Mr President and I tried to show at Cannes Lions Innovations this year with our show Faster Fresher Better More Fun. She uses Cut-ups and her Smiths’ collection; I use cards and a good long work.

Using copying to actively create error is one of the easiest ways to invent something new.

Try it.

Everyone else is.