Stained Unravel

Stained Unravel Drawings

Interface Gallery together with Nguyen Wahed presents Senescenence, a solo exhibition by Harm van den Dorpel. The exhibition brings together a body of generative animations built upon a cellular automaton in the tradition of Conway's Game of Life, where a minimal set of rules gives rise to extraordinary complexity, and where death is not failure but the system's natural feature. Alongside the screen-based works, the exhibition also includes a series of plotter drawings on paper — tracing the same generative logic into an anachronistic register. 

The title, Senescenence, is an intentional recursive misspelling of "senescence," the term for the gradual aging or deterioration of living systems, often associated with the browning of fallen leaves.

The works emerge from Van den Dorpel's ongoing research into the foundations of generative art: from the binary logic of the weaving loom, to early two-dimensional pixel graphics, to the contemporary GPU, where millions of cells can live, die, and transform simultaneously in real time. At each technological threshold, the capacity for complexity expands beyond full human control. The visual language draws on traditions that understand pattern as more than ornamentation. References to Anni Albers' textiles, Buddhist mandalas, and stained-glass windows evoke rule-based systems in which local decisions accumulate into forms that exceed their individual construction. In these systems, structure becomes a carrier of meaning. This aligns with a much older cross-cultural intuition: that geometry is not merely descriptive but generative. Within traditions of sacred geometry, structure and spirit are intertwined rather than opposed. Van den Dorpel approaches the algorithm with this mindset, not simply as a tool of expression, but as a system set into motion to allow unforeseen forms to emerge beyond the artist's direct control. The works are less composed than initiated; what appears on screen is not fully designed, but permitted.

Each cell exists only in relation to its neighbours, recursively and conditionally. Nothing endures. The patterns that surface are temporary negotiations with impermanence, and the work resists any attempt at final resolution.

[More information...](https://nguyenwahed.com/exhibitions/37-senescenence-harm-van-den-dorpel-with-interface-gallery/overview/)

Senescenence

Okazaki, Sakamoto, van den Dorpel, Murayama

Takuro Someya Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition Cloud Writings by Harm van den Dorpel. This marks his first solo exhibition at the gallery and features a series of works including new pieces unveiled for the first time in Japan. In this exhibition, van den Dorpel presents algorithmic drawings shaped by his generative practice and the ideas of female artists active in minimalism and conceptual art in the late 20th century.

<a href='https://tsca.jp/exhibition/harm-van-den-dorpel-cloud-writings/' target='_blank'>Gallery Website...</a>

Photos by Shu Nakagawa

Cloud Writings

Mutant Garden Seeder

Curated Mutations from Mutant Garden Seeder, a derivative project, mintable until pruned, immutably stored on-chain and on Arweave.

A new open-ended Ethereum ERC721 collection containing minted mutations. One token represents one static mutation. These tokens do not mutate further but are snapshots in time. The metadata of these tokens is stored on-chain and the mutation state images (SVG) on Arweave.

https://seeder.mutant.garden/

MGS Mutation Minter

Brian Droitcour in Outland on Harm van den Dorpel, whose art makes protocols things you can see and feel.

> Harm van den Dorpel is an unusually clarifying figure here because his work transcends the split. A computer scientist turned artist, he has spent two decades building interfaces, algorithms, and decentralized systems that are inseparable from the beautiful abstractions they generate. His work fuses protocols with form. And as the internet has shifted from the handmade Web 1.0 to the corporate feed and on to the messy aspirations of web3, van den Dorpel has kept remaking the conditions under which images appear—often by deliberately devising alternatives to the dominant trends of the day.

<a href='https://outlandart.substack.com/p/beautiful-rules'>Read full text...</a>

Beautiful Rules

Every twelve seconds, a new composition is seeded directly from Ethereum block hashes, synchronizing viewers worldwide in a shared visual experience. The work’s deliberate instability and absence of memory reflect Harm’s broader artistic philosophy, highlighting the inherent impermanence and poetic potential of generative digital art. 

Quantizer

The probability of downward diagonal streams increases towards the bottom side of the drawing, creating the impression of curvature, as if hovering a planet.

Courtesy Takuro Someya Contemporary Art

Atlas

In this exhibition ‘Angles Morts’, LOHAUS SOMINSKY is showing new works by the artist Harm van den Dorpel in combination with works by Vera Molnár, who is known for her pioneering work in computer and generative art. The exhibition presents the result of an impressive exploration of Harm van den Dorpel's artistic engagement with the roots of generative art.

Since 2019, Harm van den Dorpel has dedicated himself to researching artists such as Anni Albers, Vera Molnár, Charlotte Posenenske and Tauba Auerbach, who are known for their work with two-dimensional grid patterns. This research is part of his endeavour to explore his own roots in generative art and to identify his influences.

It should be noted that the artists listed are all women. In his research, Van den Dorpel recognises a dominance of female artists in the field of generative art. He considers a historical connection between the systematic arrangement of recurring elements in grid patterns and the craft of weaving, an activity traditionally dominated by women.

In his work, the artist explores the complexity of works by female artists such as Anni Albers. While it would have been technically easy to programme an algorithm that replicated her triangle patterns, it turned out that randomly placing the triangles did not achieve the desired aesthetic effect. Van den Dorpel realised that Albers must have formulated clear rules in her head, which she applied algorithmically to each cell of the grid. This realisation led to a deep respect for the invisible structures and thought processes hidden in the works of Albers and other female generative artists.

Unlike Albers, Vera Molnár worked with computer technology, but it was very limited, had no screens and provided only simple outputs that she had to manually translate into physical objects. These processes were labour intensive and resulted in small imperfections, which Van den Dorpel particularly appreciates.
Van den Dorpel uses modern algorithms and a plotter to imitate and further develop the aesthetics and methodology of his role models. A plotter is a specialised printer that creates precise technical drawings and graphics by moving pens or markers across the paper on an X-Y axis. Unlike conventional printers, which apply ink in lines from top to bottom, the plotter draws lines in different directions. This process gives the work an organic quality that goes beyond the precision of digital prints. The plotter draws lines in all directions and through the slow, mechanical movement creates unique and unrepeatable results that bring a human unpredictability to the digital works.

His interest in the methods of these artists led van den Dorpel to question and optimise his own processes. Despite his technological tools, he seeks a connection to the artisanal and intellectual approaches of his predecessors. The exhibition ‘Angles Morts’ offers a deep insight into these complex interactions between historical influences and modern technologies.

A recurring theme in van den Dorpel's practice is the instability of the digital medium, where any specific idea or form of expression is difficult to grasp. This instability avoids a fixed, definitive statement and emphasises an open system. Reflecting on the historical role of women in computational art and their often overlooked contributions, van den Dorpel honours the rigorous and visionary work of these pioneers.

[More info...](https://lohaussominsky.com/exhibitions/angles-morts)

Angles Morts

The title of this exhibition is borrowed from [a musical piece](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIkImA_bBls) released in 1983 by the Belgian composer Wim Mertens, generally positioned in the ‘Minimalist’ tradition. There are aspects of the composition that I always find myself falling for, even though there are other aspects I find a bit kitschy. In thinking about the ways in which works of art that speak to me can have this dual dimension, one of immediate appeal and a kind of intellectual resistance, the ideas behind this collection began to germinate.

The tropes of musical Minimalism seem familiar at first glance, for example, repetition, or the arpeggio. They are used and they ‘work’. When listening to a work like Mertens, I find myself liking and resisting the work simultaneously. I don’t want it to work on me, but it does. It is a work that lives up to its title; it is a struggle but a pleasurable one. In thinking about struggling for pleasure in my own visual practice, I felt closest to the concept of the struggle initially. Specifically, how pleasure can often seem suspicious somehow, and why this might be. Working in the digital realm of visual production, there is a kind of rhyming element between the fundamental features of minimalist composition and the minimal units of digital display. Rather like the spare notes played in a musical composition, the rendering of pixels in certain positions and densities create a visual composition which our minds work upon, and which work upon our minds.

The pixel is fetishised perhaps in a lot of the iconic works of contemporary digital art and NFTs, and this is something that I do find myself struggling with. For example, works like [CryptoPunks](https://opensea.io/collection/cryptopunks) lean into pixelisation by exploiting nostalgia, which I found myself wanting to resist. The pleasurable hit of playing up 8-bit graphics has always seemed to me a kind of easy way out of the problem of making an interesting visual work in the context of digital display formats. The works become about the viewer, but less about who they are personally, than about their generational position. While this is pleasure, it didn’t seem to be a lasting pleasure for me.

In creating these works, I researched how we relate to pixels, how they reveal something about how we perceive and mentally construct images. They appeal to a general cognitive faculty, but each assemblage or organisation of pixels has a personal, individualised aspect. In this way, they touch on some of the same unsteady ground the Impressionists worked upon. The elusive coherency of strokes by Monet, or later Pointillist works by Seurat sought to find a place where perception, image, and emotion met. The point, particularly in the latter case of Pointillism, offers insight into the application of the pixel: the point is information, but it can only become meaningful in the presence of other points, and other minds. In these works, I seek to take the fundamental element of digital display and examine how it can be dialogic rather than simply nostalgic.

In creating these works, I built on elements of earlier uses of an algorithm in my practice. Historically, I dedicated myself to an iterative algorithmic process which in the end hermetically generated the final ‘pleasurable images’ to be released. In the past, that iterative process involved a great deal of loss, discarding all outputs before the final algorithm would be complete. For ‘Struggle for Pleasure’, I opted for a different, gentler process: keeping images generated at all points during the iteration process and curating them into a final selection. Therefore, the collection is not merely a product of the final outputs of the final state of the algorithm but a kind of historical and procedural window on the chronological process itself. 

Here, I chose very simple operations - rather similar to the austere approaches that define minimal music - to apply to the images, such as mirroring, rotation, repetition, and in particular subdivision. The outputs often paradoxically took on an exceptionally complex, transcendental quality not unlike, for me, the way the apparently straightforward components of a mandala can. Simplicity of operation can become a window into territories of complexity where knowledge itself breaks down. This openness to uncertainty and to the dialogic process of the realisation of a work is central to the struggle for pleasure that defined the creation of the works on show here. It is my uncertainty, but it appeals to a wider openness, an openness where pleasure can flourish.

– Written by William Kherbek based on a conversation with Harm van den Dorpel, 2023

Struggle for Pleasure

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.