Lacelove

Metaballs

Metaballs ⁱⁱ

Defenseless Qualm

Occasionally manually interrupted plotter drawing

Papaver Somniferum

Anni

Generative software installation, dimensions variable.

Installed across 1 to 6 screens, each rendering the same work at an increasing level of resolution or granularity. Pictured is a 4-screen configuration at resolutions 1, 2, 4, and 6.

At a set interval, all screens simultaneously rebuild from top to bottom, governed by the same mutating rules and colour palette.

Edition of 3 + 1AP. Each edition supports between 1 and 6 screens. As a multichannel software installation, the work is not suited to NFT distribution.

Photos by Shu Nakagawa

Anni (sync)

Leaky Abstraction

Plateaux (layered)

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

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

After my graduation from art school in 2006 – when one couldn't make money with digital art yet – I worked as a web developer for various smaller and larger startups.

My task was to receive designs and turn them into dynamic websites, populated with text and images from awkward content management systems.

At that time, one of the greatest virtues expected from me, was that the designs would be translated in a ‘pixel perfect’ manner, and they should display identically regardless of the browser used.

Days were spent making sure the forms and interactions also worked on the incompatible Microsoft Internet Explorer, and that the webpages would look and behave the same on that abomination of a browser.

When making digital art, or more specifically, art that is experienced using a web browser, the same expectations of uniformity across browsers and platforms seem to prevail. My artworks, which often use quite demanding GPU accelerated graphics, or obscure quirks, should also run on the old iPad of my parents with its cracked glass touch surface.

My new Venster NFT collection depends heavily on features offered by the Scalable Vector Graphics standard (SVG), an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. Even though this standard has been around since 1999, it became clear to me that my admittedly unorthodox use of this declarative graphics language is still interpreted quite differently across contemporary web browsers.

I noticed that now, in 2024, these various browser implementations (such as Chrome, Firefox and Safari) just have different opinions about how SVG should render, even when I correctly adhere to the documented standard. Perhaps the guidelines for the rendering of visual aesthetics are more complex than what crystallized in the specification, and they leave space for interpretation?

I considered stretching my Solidity and SVG programming skills further, and restructure the graphic document, in order to make the artwork render identical on all browsers, but it required a lot more on-chain calculations, and as the source for the artworks is calculated by Solidity code, rendering would quickly run out of gas and not display anything at all.

This led me to contemplate a larger question: is it actually my responsibility as artist to adhere to the expectations of the off-chain display software stack, such as your browser, your operating system, your screen size?  Should it be responsive to all monitor aspect ratios? Should it display differently when your computer is set to “dark mode”? Am I only allowed to use features that render the same on all devices and browsers, or could I as artist prescribe the requirements for ideal display?

I don’t know.

But what I did find hugely fascinating was to view one single artwork in different browsers and see it render differently. In particular the mixing of nested blending modes, and the use of filters were interpreted in various interesting ways. Sometimes, the GPU even started to glitch with red pixel noise (at least on my computer), so I decided to deem the varying SVG interpretations a feature of the artwork.

Over time, browsers are of course still developing. Standards might (hopefully) not change, but their interpretation and support do. Long term, we cannot know which standards will remain commonly used, and which ones will be forgotten. JPG was amazing when invented, and still widely supported, but has been superseded by newer image formats in quality and compression efficacy. Will support for SVG cease at some point in the future, as it happened to Macromedia Flash not too long ago?

I invite you to watch the 100 Venster tokens on all your devices, browsers, and operating systems. Perhaps there is not one single canonical rendering, but all are subjective temporal performances of one and the same score.


Venster

https://eu-central-1.linodeobjects.com/harm/lze6zr7eJqcjr721D5HZd/spike-70-harm-van-den-dorpel.pdf

In this conversation, curator Tina Rivers Ryan and I explore generativity, in every sense of the term. Can it be an entry-point for tokenised work to stay fluid and subvert the market? 

Originally published in Spike Art Quarterly #70 from January 2022.

[Download PDF (4.6 MB)](https://eu-central-1.linodeobjects.com/harm/lze6zr7eJqcjr721D5HZd/spike-70-harm-van-den-dorpel.pdf)

The Squircle of Life

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

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 Venster collection from 2024 has a new home. Besides listing its 100 minted token, the entire seed space can now be explored.

[venster.harm.work](https://venster.harm.work/)


New Venster Site

Typographic Trace

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.

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

Source Unknown

Crystallophobia

Floppy Candour

Untitled Decompression

A website where users can live breed and mutate specimen.

Mutant .garden

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

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

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

With help of an AI, all my writing, notes, exhibition texts and press releases, have been transformed into an ever evolving wiki.

This new website is the 2026 version of Dissociations, a project I began 2010. It is an ongoing generative online artist studio, now operating as a self-configuring wiki maintained in collaboration with an LLM. It serves simultaneously as a second brain for my artistic practice and as a public knowledge base for those seeking a deep engagement with work and reasoning.

In 2013, the project was commissioned as part of the New Museum's 'First Look' online exhibition series (co-organized with Rhizome), curated by Lauren Cornell.

[dissociations.com](https://dissociations.com/)

Dissociations

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

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

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/)

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