This solo show comes at the end of a very intense period of my life. After a run of successful exhibitions, the hysterical rise (and fall) of NFTs, and the acquisition by the Stedelijk Museum of Markov’s Window for their collection. These felt like a kind of vindication of the work I had been doing, the culmination of decades of work, and a sense of arrival at an institutional level for generative art. This was something I’d sometimes lost hope in over the years: the possibility that at some point institutions would accept generative art as an equal to the major artistic movements of the last century.

While I was delighted by the recognition, I was also overwhelmed. I found myself in a kind of frenzy of obligations and conversations, and it all became a bit too much to handle. Recognition made me want to become a hermit. 
During the period in which I felt this instability in my life, I sought out professional help and in doing so I became familiarised with “Inner Child” therapy. The form I came to experience is derived from psychotherapy and it made me consider aspects of my situation, and my own biography in more detail than I had ever previously done, and it also gave me a new perspective on my work. 

For a long time, I had been engaging in highly theoretical and technologically sophisticated approaches to art. This cerebral approach certainly brought me to ideas that yielded interesting aesthetic results, but also I felt I was obscuring a part of myself. The works in this exhibition grew out of this period of searching into my own psyche, and attempting to make contact with the feelings that first inspired me to make images. Where once I might have felt insecure that certain artistic choices, certain colourful compositions, for example, immediately appealed to me, and I might have sought something more supposedly ‘intellectual’ to buttress a creation I viscerally enjoyed, here I have chosen to embrace that immediate sense of joy and bring the viewer into those moments of creative freedom and excitement.
 
Something that became apparent to me was the sense that we must accept the complexity of our minds and not attempt to judge ourselves according to rigid systems of rules. We should embrace our curiosity and accept and integrate our moments of fear and anxiety. In my own story, this has meant thinking back to the religious orthodoxy that characterised my upbringing. I spent many years trying to figure out the rules - the algorithm, one might say - to being a good person. How could I do this and avoid the terrors of the Hell that I was told about, and which I was constantly at risk of being sent to. Therapy here has helped me understand the limits of narrow legislative approaches to morality, both towards oneself and towards others. 

These insights are part of the story of these works, but there is also an aesthetic element that is important to discuss in making the works legible. To create the images for this show, I used the same algorithm that was involved in producing Markov’s Window in 2004. In the ensuing years, computing power and my own abilities had become more sophisticated and in revisiting the technology, I began to think about the way that compression and decompression work in the artistic space. I thought about the way that painters such as Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg would look at, for example, a tree and take the enormous amount of complexity they would perceive and reduce it to a few shapes or lines to convey its essence. You could think of this as a kind of compression which perhaps reaches its highest level in Mondrian’s grid-like canvases. I thought about what could happen if you moved in the opposite direction, taking something very basic, and applying the capacities of generative art to that form. In that way it becomes a process of decompression, you can move from very simple geometrical shapes to extreme complexities, moving from shapes to the level of pixels.

My generative works are originally software, and originally were seen on screens with far lower resolutions than those of today, but any kind of screen display reduces visual complexity, therefore the only way these works could truly convey their full complexity was to produce them as material objects.

We often speak of our own inner child, but what would it mean to embrace a larger sense of a collective inner child, the vulnerability and joy that lies at the heart of everyone. I invite visitors to begin exploring that question, to begin looking deeper at things, and embracing the complexities around us, in their full resolution. 

https://www.upstreamgallery.nl/exhibitions/240/our-inner-child

Our Inner Child

The large-scale group exhibition Systems of Belief brings together artistic positions that explore alternative belief systems. In a world in which political and ecological states of emergency determine everyday life, constants of social life such as science, economics and politics are increasingly being put to the test in public debates. As individuals, as a society and as an entire ecosystem, we are currently facing great challenges. Challenging, even overwhelming, is often the subjective processing of the complex world events that flow into us through various streams of information and shape our view of the present.

With work by Jordan Belson, Harm van den Dorpel, Storm de Hirsch, Antonia De La Luz Kašik, Richard Kriesche, Paul Laffoley, Irina Lotarevich, Lee Scratch Perry, and Marta Riniker-Radich. Many thanks to Jan Tappe.

https://halle-fuer-kunst.at/en/exhibitions/systems-of-belief/

Systems of Belief

Duo exhibition with Achraf Touloub

Galerie Noah Klink    
Kulmer Straße 17, 10783 Berlin

12.11.2022 – 29.01.2023

Context Switch

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

A Forest

Edition of 2 + 1AP

Named after an [Autechre track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F665Mkc0D0).

Altibzz

Sprite

Klimt

Series of pixel "paintings" constructed by recursively subdividing squares.

> "I thought about what could happen if you moved in the opposite direction, taking something very basic, and applying the capacities of generative art to that form. In that way it becomes a process of decompression, you can move from very simple geometrical shapes to extreme complexities, moving from shapes to the level of pixels."



Resolution Paintings

Typographic Trace

Unique edition + 1AP

Light exposure on photographic aluminium paper, mounted behind acrylic glass, framed

Modular Mind

Blush Array III

Eventide Paramour

Wednesday, April 3 2019, 15:19:55 CEST (Pleasant  Modules)

Blush Array II

Blush Array

Pejorative Highlights

Mutant Garden Seeder consists of 512+1 generative unique Ethereum NFTs by artist Harm van den Dorpel, released in collaboration with Folia in 2021.

Mutant Garden Seeder

High resolution render of the Mutant Garden algorithm, manually calibrated. When this one was made the renderer did not use Gaussian blur yet. Its composition primarily benefits from the alternating AB/BA grid structures and its colours from a balanced pastel palette (HSL colour space).

12000×12000px

Alternate Ploy

Plural Shim

Grand Formation

Zwour

UltraChrome HD print on archival fine art paper

Decent Fabric

Moksi

Odd Motives

Mutant Garden Tracer

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

Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Mutant Garden Autobreeder

Hissed Hyphen Flicks

Hazy Sparkle Boost

Poly Fill

Run Too

Early high resolution render of the Mutant Garden algorithm, manually retouched.

9331×9331px

By Harm van den Dorpel, 2020

(title by William Kherbek)

Neural Dust

Trivializer

Triddle

While developing the Mutant Garden algorithm based on Cartesian Genetic Programming, my programming error produced this unexpected recursive structure.

8000×8000px

Mutant Garden (early bug)

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

Untitled (pleasant modules II)

Symbol No Aggression

Push Forth Specter

daisies

Decompression

Untitled (1554993052565)

Trebles

Field

SPARCStation

Rendered using Cartesian genetic programming

Friendly Conglomerate

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.

Mutant Garden

Shunned Mass

Umbilical Dramatoxin

Bloated Taunt

Defenseless Qualm

Unheard Estimator

Audit Myth Buzz

Bemused Aversatility

Unscripted Relinings

Fickle Particle I

Eponymous Seedling

Algues Artificielles

Hybrid Vigor .bio

Torn split

Dechayotic

Adoreway

Availablesky

Frouters

Bluena

During the summer of 2016, I spent a few weeks with my family by sea in Bretagne, France. During these times when one is expected to relax and not work, somehow ideas come more freely. I liked how the seaweed and jellyfish washed ashore and formed shapes and compositions which were always different, but, also, somehow always the same.

I tried to programme a simple piece of computer code to simulate these smooth, round curves. The effects were surprisingly satisfying. Somehow, my shapes reminded me of the sculptural works of Hans Arp.
Instead of randomly generating those shapes, which was quickly becoming a bit boring, I tried to define a mechanism by which I could influence the outcome. I was wondering what would be the ‘most interesting’ composition. Could a process of feedback between me and the software be considered a kind of dialectic?

I devised a system in which the drawings - consisting of multiple lines and shapes - would evolve and improve over time. In many iterations, the system would give me a generation of works; each time I would pick two from which more ‘children’ would be bred. Because the breeding always happens between ‘siblings’ - a sort of mechanical incest - the diversity would gradually converge.

Technically (or biologically?), all properties of a drawing (angles, smoothness, shape, colour, transparency, scale, position, etc.) are stored in a long sequence of 0s and 1s: a digital genome. These genomes hermetically define the appearance (or phenotype) of each work (or specimen).

When two people (or, in this case, two drawings) are selected and mate, both of their chromosomes are aligned, and ad-random genes are selected from either parent (crossover). From this game of recombination, both iterative and diverse offspring emerge.

The process of selecting candidates for breeding, examining the results, and using those results to further breed to eliminate or emphasise particular traits in animals and flowers is called 'hybrid vigour'.  My website, 'Hybrid Vigor’, is publicly accessible to crowd-source this process in an evolutionarily selective way, using the internet visitor as the fitness function.

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 entire population, 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 programmer, 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

A remake of a Flash animation from 2008, but now 100% on-chain: no IPFS, no web servers, no dependencies ✲ responsive and interactive.

The background gradient and spinner colour adapt to your system settings for dark or light mode.

Field 1

Field 2

A remake of a Flash animation from 2008, but now 100% on-chain: no IPFS, no web servers, no dependencies ✲ responsive and interactive.

Field 3

Field 4

Field 5

A remake of a Flash animation from 2008, but now 100% on-chain: no IPFS, no web servers, no dependencies ✲ responsive and interactive

Field 6

A remake of a Flash animation I once made in 2008, but now 100% on-chain: no IPFS, no webservers, no dependencies. All code is contained in the smart contract. Responsive and interactive.
 
[Read more about this series...](https://harm.work/writing/field-2008-2023)   

[OpenSea](https://opensea.io/collection/field-harm-van-den-dorpel) | [Smart contract source code](https://etherscan.io/address/0xc1cb5ea3a3541af83b0417dc26e04628193a53d3#code)

Monochrome algorithmic animation of figure 14 of the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome patent from 1965

Geodesic Dome Patent Drawing (Fig. 14)

Blob

Danse Macabre

This is a screenrecording, capturing a frame in intervals, while I manually erase pixels from the image.

Bison.gif

These are some of my oldest works. The originals date to 2005 when I was still in art school. I found the source images for these works by browsing websites - not really something one does today. Around that time, people would publish sites with Apache web server and essentially forget they were there, despite having uploaded their entire hard drive to them. I would go through sites like these and find clip art images of animals. There was a kind of amateurism about these sites and images that I liked. You wouldn’t find it today, as everyone uses social media and cloud-based technologies to display things online. 

The simplicity of those approaches is also written into the work. The pixel sorter is based on a very minimal set of local rules: from a given pixel, the sorter analyses to determine if the points immediately adjacent have pixels. If there is one, the image stays still, if not, then the current pixel moves down. It’s a simple process, but it gives the appearance of some kind of physical law being applied to the image, a kind of digital manifestation of entropy. Or maybe a bit like cellular automata even.  

Pixel Sorters

Enhanced 2023 remake of the [classic 2004 Flash version](https://harm.work/work/markovs-window)

Markov's Window 2023

A simple sub-dividing algorithm working in time, populating squares with sequences from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Diagnostics

Photographic exposure on metallic paper, mounted behind acrylic glass, with black aluminium frame. Dimensions are measured diagonally. Edition of 2 + 1 AP. 

Somewhat inspired by my encounter with cherry blossom in Japan.

Synthesis Euphoria

Twenty-five drawings, each based on a work by Fernand Léger, drawn with a laptop touchpad, overlapping in time, in ever changing order, by Harm van den Dorpel.

This work was commissioned by the Triton Foundation Collection, in collaboration with Upstream Gallery. Premiered at the Kröller Müller museum alongside original paintings by Léger.

About

Harm van den Dorpel

Exhibitions