We all know DNA forms the blueprint of life. Through mutation and crossover, genetic information is passed to our children. How exactly this information that builds our bodies, and organises our trillions of cells, each line in our skin, is encoded in our genes is miraculous. Equating our DNA to a "map" of our body, where there would be a one-to-one relationship between genes and cells, makes no sense. Such a map would exceed the territory. The genome is limited to contain a relatively small amount of information. 

Instead, it is better to think of our genetic information as a repository of many highly efficient intertwined strategies, recipes, methods – algorithms, if you will – from which the huge amount of cells that compose our bodies are generated, recursively. These instructions in our DNA are parsed and executed, over and over again, based on local conditions: if this, then do that, or else do this. Genetic information could be considered as a [compressed](https://www.pnas.org/content/117/31/18489) collection of computer programmes, from which life emerges.

It is my conviction that this tension between relative simplicity of computational rules, but enormous complexity in outcome, holds the key to understanding life, and by extension, our aesthetic appreciation of it. We are attracted to visual systems which are to some extent complex, novel, tantalising, yet at the same time contain familiar, repeating elements. Difference and variation, surprise and expectation, have provided essential building blocks in the history of human expression.

To that end, I have developed evolutionary algorithms to research and optimise this trade off. But just as mutations in biology often result in death of specimens, mutations in software often result in programmes that get stuck in an [infinite loop](https://0xsalon.pubpub.org/pub/gzqsnrse/release/8#n2qbnx82rci): the notorious blue screen of death or endless rainbow spinner on MacOS. My engineering challenge was to devise an environment where I could freely let programmes mutate without crippling them. To achieve this, I turned to an existing algorithm called Cartesian Genetic Programming, invented by Julian F. Miller and Peter Thomson in 1997 (see [my interview with Julian](/writing/a-35-billion-year-old-technology-an-interview)) to come to the Mutant Garden software.

In the "Autobreeder" on display in the main room (the "garden") specimens undergo mutation, and siblings are evaluated based on measuring their visual complexity versus cost of computation. Complex compositions that were relatively quick to generate are favoured over simple images that took disproportionate effort. I used the outputs of this algorithm as input for my own aesthetic wetware: I curated, and optimised the highly complex compositions, emphasised desired traits in a painterly, subjective, and labour intensive process.

Some of these works are materialised as digital exposures on photographic paper (lightjet), others are printed on archival paper using UltraChrome inks. These are installed alongside the Autobreeder.

In the smaller room (the "lab"), an additional software work is installed which visualises how the genetic code is formatted as a two-dimensional network, and how this is parsed to generate the layered visual compositions.

On one wall, as a timeline of my larger project of algorithmic archaeology, from each iteration, one work is installed, highlighting my own artistic practice as a genealogy as well.

To conclude, a series of light emitting tablets connect the various algorithms, series, works by myself, by other contemporary artists, and historical art movements. These help me define my activities in a broader artistic and historical frame, and appreciate associations in their own right.
    
– Harm

Mutant Garden

My work Markov's Window will be part of the permanent collection display of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. It will be installed as a "transhistorical intervention" into BASE, the modern section of the display, where it will be in close proximity to sections on Bauhaus, Mondriaan, and the Russian Avant-garde. According to the museum: "It will thus be the only contemporary work in this section of BASE, which will give it a unique emphasis. This positioning will be a strong statement, intertwining such a forward-thinking digital work within the canon of abstraction."

On display from the 22nd of September 2020.


Stedelijk Base

"Proof of Work" brings together works engaged with the culture around cryptocurrency, bitcoin and blockchain as a possible new infrastructure for money, computing and organizing. This includes artwork made by crypto builders, crypto experiments built by artists, and paintings and drawings that resonate with cryptocurrency but predate the invention of bitcoin. 

Curated by Simon Denny in dialogue with Distributed Gallery, Harm van den Dorpel, Sarah Hamerman and Sam Hart, Kei Kreutler, Aude Launay and Anna-Lisa Scherfose

Proof of Work

Group exhibition with work by Forensic Architecture, Cao Fei, Rachel Ara, Zach Blas, Simon Denny, Chris Shen, Sylbee Kim, Woonghyun Kim and Harm van den Dorpel.

Vertiginous Data

In his first solo exhibition with Upstream Gallery, Harm van den Dorpel features works from multiple series’ that react to different moments in the history of cybernetics.

Pattern and Presence, the title of the show, is taken from the book ‘How we became posthuman’ by N. Katherine Hayles (1999), in which she describes the historical development of cybernetics and politics of disembodiment.

Van den Dorpel employs various information technologies from this history of cybernetics in his artistic practice. He wants to demystify both the romantic notion of the ‘artistic genius’ as well as the ‘black box’ of computer algorithms, which increasingly influence our personal lives and forecast our political future. Where other traditional artistic mediums require the artist to create the work with their own hand, Van den Dorpel rather programs software and trains it by looping continuous feedback through its output in order to produce works with unpredictable aesthetic outcomes. In this hybrid process, genetic properties are ascribed to the elements and composition that make up his artworks. By selecting and crossbreeding across many generations, “optimal” artworks emerge.

For this new series of printed transparent work (which is a continuation of his earlier series “Death Imitates Language”) Van den Dorpel focuses on the structure of ‘nesting’: a strong organizing principle found in architecture, software development and human language. The artist draws on this system in order to compare the construction of language to the construction of artworks, and in doing so, refers to the painterly question of how to fill the two-dimensional plane using composition and layering. The genetic algorithms he uses, originate from developments in computer science which emerged in the 1960s through to the 1980s and include: ‘Turtle graphics’ by Seymour Papert (late 1960s); research of feedback, reflexivity, nesting and recursion (Autopoiesis, Varela & Maturana, 1972); and Artificial Life (Christopher Langton, 1986).

Van den Dorpel also draws on recent developments in blockchain technology, specifically the Ethereum blockchain, in order to assign each work a unique identifier (a hash or fingerprint). This functions as a token which can be traded on the Ethereum blockchain and changes the status of the artwork to a form of currency – or a representation of itself – which circles back to the initial question of embodiment: are the works in fact the works? Or, are they representations of an external, less material essence? 

Pattern & Presence

A series of early works - the oldest one being from 2005 - will be made available for purchase for the first time this weekend. This [NFT drop](/news/tokenizing-sustainability) includes 3 editioned pixel sorters, encoded to animated GIF.

The offering has been curated by Folia, who have also recently minted work by Petra Cortright, Hesaitix, Travess Smalley and  Oliver Laric (coming up).

To participate in the bidding visit the [Folia website](https://www.folia.app/sets/pixel-sorters).

Starting Saturday the 20th, 9PM CET.

[Folia Substack](https://folia.substack.com/)   
[Pixel Sorters Series](/series/pixel-sorters)   

Vintage NFT drop

It's fascinating and exciting (and at times demoralizing) to follow the surging interest in NFTs (non-fungible tokens).  People have approached me asking for my opinion on them, given that I run [left gallery](https://left.gallery). So, here is my highly personal and entirely subjective take on the matter.

### History

I minted my first NFTs in 2015 with the help of the now defunct [ascribe.io](https://www.ascribe.io/). Their pioneering service allowed creators to upload their work, mint editions on the Bitcoin blockchain, and to transfer them as tokens when sold.

Even though, at the time, this sounded like an abstract and intangible fad, the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna did buy 20 tokenized editions of my work, [Event Listeners](https://left.gallery/work/event-listeners), through the marketplace [Cointemporary](https://twitter.com/cointemporary). The Museum paid with Bitcoin, which made it a historical transaction: it was the first time a museum bought NFTs, and paid with a cryptocurrency. The event gained quite some [media attention](https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/mak-vienna-becomes-first-museum-to-acquire-art-using-bitcoin-a-harm-van-den-dorpel-3995/), and, gradually, all my 100 editions were sold to collectors and another museum.

This unexpected success inspired my partner, [Paloma Rodríguez Carrington](http://frameshift.berlin/), and me to start our own marketplace for blockchain ascribed artworks: [left gallery](https://left.gallery). We would sell "downloadable objects'' in large editions for low prices. Customers could pay with crypto, PayPal, or credit card, and, after purchase, we would manually transfer the token belonging to their purchase to those clients interested in having them – most didn't understand what a blockchain was at all.

The insights of ascribe.io were radical and definitely ahead of their time. Unfortunately, the state of blockchain technology then was not mature enough to support their business model; ascribe stopped offering their service around 2017, and they pivoted to become a database company. 

Although the token provenance information that ascribe stored on the immutable Bitcoin blockchain will always remain there, in practice, we have lost access to it, as their web interface to retrieve it was discontinued. So, in 2018, I bit the bullet and deployed my first [ERC721 smart contract](http://erc721.org/) and I minted Ethereum tokens for the editions that had been sold. I asked owners to send me their Ethereum wallet address in order to transfer them the tokens for the editions they owned. This was, in itself, an "interesting" situation, because this meant that some editions were now tokenized on two blockchains at once.

To my disappointment, when I announced this new Ethereum website integration, few buyers actually requested the token belonging to their purchase. Sales on left gallery continued, but interest in ERC721 tokens kept declining among our clientele. At the same time, the transaction costs kept increasing, to a degree where the costs for minting and transferring tokens exceeded the sales price of the actual artworks by orders of magnitude.

### 2020

Then came COVID19. The income of my partner and I dropped significantly, as we had fewer clients and the art market was on hold. This unusual moment created the opportunity to redevelop the left gallery website (from scratch) using new technology, and support ourselves and other artists by increasing gallery revenue.

As only a few buyers in the previous years had shown interest in owning an NFT for their purchase, I hesitated to implement an integration with the Ethereum blockchain _again_. This meant that left gallery now became a regular online marketplace where ownership records were stored in a regular database. I was proud of what we had achieved with the left gallery relaunch, and I was amazed by all the works that artists offered on it, but also it hurt, because left gallery had lost some of its "blockchain soul".

### 2021

To my surprise a renewed interest in NFTs emerged in the first quarter of 2021, which, to be honest, initially annoyed me. In my humble opinion, the works now offered as NFTs were not very interesting, or just plain ugly. Why were people suddenly willing to pay so much Ether for such bad "art", while they often hesitated to pay for the affordable, non-NFT artworks on left gallery? It seemed to me this hype surrounding NFTs was not grounded in a genuine appreciation of the artworks.

Still, the rush toward NFTs turned out to be an opportunity for me as well, as I had some old, and newer, artworks that never found their ways to art collectors, but which suddenly very well fitted the editioning, format, and price range of NFTs. So I did profit from this second(?) wave of NFT. However, as the general interest in NFTs has grown explosively, so did questions about its environmental impact.

### Waste

I find it hard to judge exactly how wasteful the Ethereum blockchain is, and how, in relative terms, environmentally destructive it is compared to, for example, the Google data centres that power our daily search queries, or CI/CD pipelines, or credit card payment networks, etc. I wonder why the preponderance of general opinion questions their use of electricity much less than that of NFTs. Many people lack a deep technical understanding of computing: they do not realise that there are many other (non-NFT) smart contracts running on the same blockchain, and the popularity of NFTs does not correlate to the general energy use of the validators. Were all artists to abandon Ethereum en masse, it would not make our planet greener.

However, I think that it’s hard to deny that the current Ethereum blockchain is wasteful _by design_. The "proof-of-work" (PoW) consensus algorithm ingests huge amounts of electricity to crunch meaningless mathematical riddles, which secure the network from fraudulent transactions. Additionally, PoW is limited in the amount of transactions it can process per second, and transaction costs can become ridiculously high.

These limitations have been known since the inception of the Ethereum blockchain, and its developer community has already gone a long way in replacing the PoW algorithm with another algorithm: proof-of-stake (PoS). I will spare readers my attempts to explain how these two algorithms differ technically, but the takeaway is that PoS does not depend on computing power to solve random math puzzles, and, therefore, burns far less electricity than PoW. A blockchain running on a PoS algorithm can handle many more transactions in a given amount of time; transaction costs might be low, or even zero. Even though PoS is not a silver bullet, it is my understanding that abandoning PoW in favour of PoS will improve on the environmental issues associated with NFTs.

### Future

The Ethereum website [promises to complete the transition](https://ethereum.org/zh/eth2/) to proof-of-stake in 2022, which will "signal the end of energy-intensive mining". This is hopeful, but how can we be sure they will meet this deadline? Are there feasible alternatives?

I was delighted when our [funding application was granted](https://interchain-io.medium.com/icf-q2-2020-funding-recipients-e5cbb326c23c) by the Interchain Foundation for the development of an "application-specific" proof-of-stake blockchain. Where Ethereum hosts many unrelated applications all on one blockchain (competing for scarce resources), an application-specific blockchain consists of only one application, fine-tuned to its unique requirements. We will be developing such a blockchain using the Cosmos SDK. The long-term vision of the Cosmos community includes connecting many of these isolated blockchains, forming an “Internet of blockchains”.

We will eventually find out if the current renewed enthusiasm for NFTs will stabilise and form a sustainable market that will benefit artists over the long term. Practically, I will continue to use the Ethereum blockchain for selected artworks, in anticipation of the announced transition to the environmentally more sustainable PoS algorithm, while simultaneously developing our own light-weight blockchain.

– Harm van den Dorpel, edited by William Kherbek


Tokenizing Sustainability

Plural Shim

Zwour

UltraChrome HD print on archival fine art paper

Decent Fabric

Moksi

Odd Motives

Generative animated artwork, based on evolutionary programming. Dimensions variable, duration infinite, silent.

Mutant Garden Autobreeder

Associative Display (organisms)

Run Too

Neural Dust

Trivializer

Triddle

Source Unknown

Crystallophobia

Floppy Candour

Untitled Decompression

A website where users can live breed and mutate specimen.

Mutant Garden Website

Autobreeder (single screen)

Multi Dimensional Zoom

Crud

Mod Two

Symbol No Aggression

Push Forth Specter

daisies

Decompressed Embrace

Untitled (1554993052565)

Trebles

1554994948963

Bars

This artwork uses an algorithm called 'Cartesian genetic programming', intented approximately twenty years ago by Julian F. Miller and Peter Thomson. It is called ‘Cartesian’ because it represents a computer program as a two-dimensional grid: nodes and layers. Althought the result of my specific use of this algorithm is also two-dimensional, the algorithm is versatile and can also generate completely different systems, such time based media, human language or three-dimensional structures.

As we also encounter in genetic encoding in "real nature", the genotype contains many redundant genes, which are well known to assist in effective evolutionary development.

In Mutant Garden, clicking one rectangular 'mutant' will cause its siblings to be replaced with newly mutated offspring. This breeding strategy requires only one parent to be selected because the algorithm utilizes mutation, rather than cross-over.

As many people nowadays tend to equate articial intelligence with neural networks, I wanted to highlight the evolutionary progress in this recent history of computation, approaching it as algorithmic archeology. Each new innovation in this lineage aimed to improve or declare its predecessor obsolete, yet would simultaneously stand on its shoulders.

Big Pablo Ferenc Zatlas

Juancar Zolim Juancar

Vvgdamn Pipikaka Yozdczmi

Hatter Epot Xgeubke

This fullscreen software autosurfs the massive genealogy of the 'death imitates language' project, containing the first 12.000 specimen, bred by a genetic algorithm, and selected by micro-feedback of the artist

offline, duration infinite, not interactive, silent, macOS


Autobreeder

Shtonk Vtejuwoh Bonifac

This website contains an enormous population of speculative works. Each of these works is generated by inheriting sequences of information — a sort of DNA — from its ancestors. These ‘genetic’ codes determine which elements appear in the work and in what form or constellation. The population changes over time by means of subjective ('natural') selection by the artist: micro feedback or 'likes' about which of the works can live on, which ones should die, and who can procreate. This feedback, combined with visitor statistics and simulated aging, causes the genetic program to mutate and (arguably) improve over time.

When creatures reach their optimal state they are 'frozen' and potentially translated into physical objects.

Death Imitates Language online genealogy

Vuwtvvyft Zcuviey Dayssuck

In the years leading up to ‘Death Imitates Language’, I was trying more and more to be an ‘artist artist’, someone who fitted into the gallery space and the art markets in conventional terms. I had some success, but I also had a sense of sadness about the process. It felt a bit hollow and disconnected from the Net Art which I saw myself as coming out of. For a while, I thought about turning away from the art world and doing what I really enjoyed most, which was programming. While I was in this unsettled period, I was doing a lot of generative graphics, but I was somewhat bored. I felt like the graphics needed a bit more development and direction to add to the randomness created by the programmes. 

It was around this time that I saw a video by the programer, philosopher and general provocateur, Vinay Gupta, about algorithms and dating apps. Gupta estimated that Tinder and similar apps were responsible for essentially engineering about 10% of the dates that took place in the countries where the app was used. The idea of a dating app that works ‘too well’ and ends up in a long term relationship was a serious risk for the apps’ business models, or so Gupta argues. Apparently companies decided that for their purposes it was better to use machine learning and AI to engineer the algorithm to bring people together who were likely to feel attraction, but whose relationships were also likely to be volatile. I started thinking about what might happen if a child was conceived in one of these short and sharp relationships. That child’s biology would be, in part, algorithmically determined. The biopolitics of that were quite a lot to get my head around, but it did give me a direction for the graphics project, an idea that breeding aesthetic populations might also provide a way to visualise how machines understand data and ‘create’, and how art might emerge from that process. The work has now gone on for some time; probably longer than a lot of the relationships that gave me the idea in the first place.

A series of works exploring the development of meaning in generative aesthetics using micro feedback and a genetic algorithm. It consists of a website and a series of printed and boxed collage works.

The public website contains an enormous population of speculative works. Each of these works are generated by inheriting sequences of information - a sort of DNA - from their ancestors. These ‘genetic’ codes determine which elements appear in the work and in what form or constellation. The population changes over time by means of subjective ('natural') selection by me: micro feedback or 'likes'. This feedback - combined with visitor statistics and simulated aging - causes the genetic program to mutate and (arguably) improve over time.

When creatures reach their optimal state they are 'frozen' and translated into physical objects. These objects are layered in construction, partly transparent and square. They can be hung and watched from all sides.

[Featured in Rhizome's Net Art Anthology](https://anthology.rhizome.org/death-imitates-language)

Death Imitates Language

Love how this one aged: it used to be b/w. I made it by applying heat + water to shopping receipts paper (no paint or ink) and called it "Calor Scripturam", which is just a fancy way of saying "heat writing" in Latin.

Photo by Gert Jan van Rooij, courtesy Upstream Gallery Amsterdam.

Calor Scripturam

Assemblage (About)

Markov was a Russian mathematician (1856 - 1922) who is best known for his work on chance. He described the so called “Markov Chain”: a simple method to calculate the probability of something new happening, by looking only at the current situation, and ignoring events in the past. This is sometimes characterized as “memorylessness”.

The composition starts off as a single square, filling the whole screen. This square can split into multiple segments, it might change its colour, or it might rotate 45°. Each of these changes in appearance have a particular chance of happening, purely based on their current state.

A square can subdivide into sub-squares, which in turn can split into other segments, and so forth. This could potentially happen infinite times. The property of nested subdivision is called “recursivity”, and is commonly found in software development, architecture and linguistics.

By defining only a few simple probabilistic rules the artist created a system that can achieve a very complex composition. Whereas Mondriaan might have made many studies and versions to reach one single best possible composition, this work instead embraces perpetual change.


About

Harm van den Dorpel

News

Vintage NFT drop

Tokenizing Sustainability

Exhibitions

Mutant Garden

Stedelijk Base

Proof of Work

Vertiginous Data

Pattern & Presence

Series

Mutant Garden

Death Imitates Language

Works

Mutant Garden Autobreeder

Death Imitates Language online genealogy

Calor Scripturam

Assemblage (About)

Markov's Window

Deli Near .Info

Big Pablo Ferenc Zatlas

Floppy Candour