The ability to create new combinations from existing resources is a powerful force for creativity and innovation. By recombining ideas, materials and practices, new and potentially unknown possibilities can emerge. This idea underlies many of the technologies, creative outcomes, and collaborations we find in art/science integration and more broadly in the world we live in. It drives the variation and diversity we find biological populations. It is a key building block that makes the Internet possible. HTML, the ‘language’ for the web, allows for radical reconfiguration of pieces, or HTML tags, to form the structure of a website. There are an infinite number of possibilities in how these elements can be recombined and that is what makes it so useful – and meaningful.

This ‘combinatorial creativity’ is what connects each of the works within this set, and Golan Levin and Shawn Simms free Universal Construction Kit is perhaps the best example of this. It has the ability to create new combinations that you couldn’t previously by bridging systems that weren’t designed or intended to connect. The same is true of ‘Hackathons’ which bring people together from different backgrounds who wouldn’t normally interact. It creates a fusion of talent to incubate new ideas, projects and skills. Finally, the Center for Genomic Gastronomy blends a mix of culture, food, technology and futures, rearranging them to explore new possibilities in food production and consumption. All of these examples illustrate the potential that emerges in linking discrete sources of meaning, practices and materials to deliver new innovative and creative combinations. 

- Adapted from a conversation with Gabriel Harp