” In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
— C.G. Jung
In the beginning was Chaos. Before form, before language, before cosmos itself, there was Chaos. Across ancient mythologies, chaos is not simply destruction but the fertile ground from which worlds emerge. Every act of creation begins with a movement through uncertainty.
Or perhaps, as the Surrealists believed, creation begins precisely where certainty dissolves. Chaos is not merely the absence of order; it is the fertile space from which imagination, transformation, and new forms of knowledge emerge.
From the primordial chaos of ancient mythologies to contemporary theories of complexity, emergence, and uncertainty, chaos has long occupied a central place within philosophy, psychology, science, literature, and the arts. It is the realm of beginnings and endings, breakdown and renewal, disorientation and discovery. It unsettles established structures while simultaneously opening unforeseen possibilities.
Arts-based research, likewise, often begins in uncertainty. Rather than following predetermined routes toward fixed conclusions, it embraces intuition, experimentation, ambiguity, metaphor, and creative risk. Images emerge before explanations. Poems reveal what analysis cannot yet articulate. Performance, movement, visual art, music, storytelling, and making become methods through which researchers navigate complexity and discover knowledge that cannot be reached through conventional approaches alone.
Why this conference?
In an age increasingly defined by ecological uncertainty, technological acceleration, political instability, and rapidly changing understandings of identity, creativity and knowledge, chaos has become one of the defining conditions of contemporary life.
Rather than resisting uncertainty, this conference asks how creatives and researchers might inhabit it creatively. How might chaos become not a problem to solve, but a space to think, create, imagine, and discover differently?
This conference invites creatives, researchers, writers, practitioners, therapists, educators, and scholars to explore the many faces of chaos—not simply as disorder, but as a creative, epistemological, psychological, ecological, and aesthetic force.
We welcome contributions from all disciplines that investigate chaos through both creative and academic approaches.
Possible themes include (but are not limited to) the following:
Literature, poetry, and creative writing
- Chaos as method
- Experimental writing and language disruption
- Writing uncertainty and the unknown
Visual arts
- Chaos in painting, sculpture, installation, and photography
- Abstraction, entropy, and emergence
- Artistic processes of improvisation
- Generative and chance-based art
Performance, theatre, and dance
- Improvisation and unpredictability
- Embodied chaos
- Movement between order and disorder
Music and sound
- Improvisation
- Chaos and rhythm
Psychology and depth psychology
- Chaos and individuation
- Dreams and the unconscious
- Chaos and the archetypes
Mythology and religion
- Primordial chaos across cultures
- Chaos monsters and dragons
- Sacred disorder
Philosophy
- Chaos and becoming
- Complexity theory
- Uncertainty as epistemology
Ecology and environmental humanities
- Ecological collapse and regeneration
- Climate uncertainty
Education
- Learning through uncertainty
- Chaos and arts-based methodologies
Health and wellbeing
- Illness and disruption
- Trauma and reconstruction
- Art-making through crisis
Technology and digital arts
- Algorithmic randomness
- AI and creative emergence
- Glitch aesthetics
Arts-Based Research methods
- Not-knowing as research practice
- Creative experimentation
- Poetic inquiry
- Autoethnography
- A/r/tography
The full conference programme will be announced following the proposal deadline, once all presenters have been selected.
Note: Participants interested in attending the conference without presenting a paper are also welcome.
Submission Guidelines: Please fill out this proposal form by November 1, 2026: https://forms.gle/wnesgHyr9WLdgF6N7
For any inquiries, please contact our conferences team on conferences@labrc.co.uk
