What does error have to do with creativity?

Mistakes are always seen as something negative, something to avoid. Society itself demands a certain conduct from us,
free of slip-ups, if we want to win and succeed. But the truth is that sometimes it is precisely these mistakes that bring us luck.
From an error, just like a glitch - a sudden flaw in the sequence of code that makes up a piece of content - can emerge the intuition that makes all the difference.

Our existence is made of experimentation, of calculations and recalculations, of evolution; and the magic of discovery lies precisely in error.
But what does error have to do with creativity?

Perfection is never a good starting point for creativity. Error, chance and the unexpected have been great sources of inspiration for artists for more than a century. Central to the poetics of movements like Dada and Surrealism, they serve music, cinema and photography too; they serve creativity as a whole.

It is like science: error brings innovation.
To err is human, but this does not mean that people, and artists, have to prove their individuality - or humanity - through the mistakes they make. It means that error itself, and an openness to error, are intrinsic to the creative process, and that knowing how to handle them takes a certain genius. That is where “the artist’s hand” lies.

We could give endless examples of songs, works and objects that used a mistake as a “spark”. The world of rock, for instance, is full of errors that turned into gold. One that was fixed on record is in The Police’s Roxanne: at the fifth second you hear a dissonant piano chord that was never meant to be in the song. Before starting to sing, Sting sat down on the piano in the studio, not knowing the keyboard lid was open. He played the chords with his backside, but everyone liked the effect so much that it was kept in the final version.

From Pasteur, who helped develop vaccines by chancing upon contaminated cultures, to Picasso, who turned stains on his canvases into unexpected shapes; from Edison, who collected failures as necessary steps towards the light bulb, to the sonic experiments of jazz, where the “mistake” of an off-scale note instantly becomes an unexpected riff. In every discipline, error is not an intruder but a travelling companion: it points to detours, suggests alternative routes, reveals what we did not know we were looking for.

Embracing mistakes, then, means cultivating a form of listening: listening to what the material - a colour, a chord, a word - is trying to tell us when it slips out of our control. It means trusting the process more than the plan, opening up to play more than to the result. Creativity is not a victory over reality; it is the ability to dance with its imperfections. Letting error in means recognising that fragility, chance and surprise are the true engines of invention.