History
Jane called Amiee around the middle of 2009 and said, “Everything is pretty crap, isn’t it?”
Amiee said something like, “Yes, it is,” and politely because she’s very polite. But probably what she meant was, “Congratulations, Einstein, you on day release or what?”
Amiee thought they should do something.
They also agreed that the only solution was to start something that was more fun, more entertaining, and more ridiculous than the things that were terrible.
The thing that makes life worth living, they thought, is the utterly earnest pursuit of ludicrous things.
That’s all you really need to know about Chaos Thaoghaire, except that it is and always will be a work in progress. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an approach, not an event. It’s about getting people to acknowledge and embrace their own curiosity, their sense of the absurd, and rather than be collectors of information like the people who win table quizzes, be explorers and chroniclers of their own experiences and creators of new ones.
A lot of what happens at Chaos Thaoghaire is one big you-had-to-be-there joke. We’re so obsessed with cataloging and saving and archiving everything we do that there’s something kind of sweet about an event that can’t be simulated in any other way than being there.
Chaos Thaoghaire is this: if you get a load of people in a room and tell them to be creative, they’ll probably freeze. If you get a whole bunch of people in a room and pit them against each other at games, get a whole load of other people talking from their guts, all of a sudden everyone wants to be the creative genius.
