It all started with a dot basket. A simple white plastic tub with round cut-outs.
Just to be clear, I love dots.
Dots can be a nod to detail – dotting an “i” or dotting your table with confetti. We connect the dots to help us to understand the relationship between experiences, people, and things we love or find challenging. Steve Jobs suggests that one can only connect the dots by looking backward. Yayoi Kusama uses them to represent infinity.
I have always believed in the details, the connections, the possibilities, the dots.
Hard-wired to notice small details, I see beauty and efficiency in how something looks, sounds, or feels. Seemingly random, insignificant things and moments often resonate, get my wheels turning, filling me with great joy. I have torn images out of magazines and copied pages from books for years; details I loved and wanted to remember, along with everything I was already cataloging in my head just from walking down the street. For someone like me, the internet was both a blessing and a curse. Infinite inspiration along with the challenge of keeping track of all those ideas and resources.
Back in 2007, a continuous row of dot baskets lined the top shelves on my long living room wall. Each contained a myriad of related items – a sort of loosey-goosey filing system – so when I needed to put my hands on something specific, it generally required emptying out the entire bin. Admittedly not the best system, but it worked as a quick and easy method to put things away and later be able to find them.
My friend, Tali, over with her kids one afternoon, marveled at the seeming order of that wall, of everything having a place.
“Ha,” I said. “Bins of Chaos.”
Tali laughed. “That’s what you should call it,” she said. “when you finally write it all down.”
www.binsofchaos.tumblr.com was born on December 7, 2011, and for more than ten years, it has served as my personal online filing cabinet. Images are a visual representation of an idea, a detail, or anything else I want to remember. Clicking on the image often links me to where online I saw, read, or was inspired by something. I can’t begin to calculate how often I use it; it is a great tool. And it makes me incredibly happy to see all those amazing details amassed in one place.
Somewhere along the way, I started to think about integrating language. Giving thought and words to those visuals. Contextualizing them. And now, all these years later, I have decided to move much of that content from Tumblr to a more elastic home on the web. Welcome to www.binsofchaos.com.
As I pore over the more than 2000 Tumblr entries since December 2011, trying to decide what to move and what feels a little less important ten years in, I find myself jumping around a bit: looking at BOC’s (humble) beginnings while also seeing the value in many newer ideas and content. And so, I am giving myself a bit of creative license here – to look back and to look to the future – all the while staying true to the notion that if you’re lucky, from chaos can come great beauty.
