AP in response to the work 'Move (Blockade)' by Herbert W. Franke (1991)

Fully on-chain, by Harm van den Dorpel, 2026

Metaballs ⁱⁱ

Eventide Paramour

Audit Myth Buzz

Defenseless Qualm

Unheard Estimator

Fissured Petrolling Mridangam

Hybrid Vigor .bio

Algues Artificielles

During the summer of 2016, I spent a few weeks with my family at the coast of 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?

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

Fingerprinting

Typographic Trace

Triddle

Manual mints from 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.

Single Specimens

Ethereal Others (When No One is Looking)

Ethereal Others .com

Ethereal Self .com

I made Ethereal Self at a time when my peers and I were making works that consisted of a single artwork with a single domain name. At the time these were known as ‘single serving sites’. Miltos Manetas, I think, was the first to recognise that this was a valid medium, the domain name. During this time, I became very interested in the people who were visiting the sites. 

Ethereal Self was a direct response to that interest. In a gallery context, you can see the people who come to see your work; however, on the web - at least in 2008 when this work was made - your visitors are essentially invisible. These were the first days of attempting to stream images over the web, and in terms of the work, I wondered whether it would even be possible to send the user's webcam photos to my webserver to store. It was a rather complex process at that time, encoding the image in the browser, sending them to a server for decode, and then recording the image, but it was possible to do. The work became, for me, a way of returning the gaze of the internet. The idea that a work existed on the web but as the artist, you really had only a very vague idea who anyone seeing your work might be prompted me to try to find out. These people were watching me without my knowing, and it turned out, over the course of creation of Ethereal Self and Ethereal Others, I was watching them without their knowing too. 

In Ethereal Others, the people who visited the site were listed in a grid, and sometimes when visitors had forgotten to turn their cameras off, I would end up with hours of footage, some of it very private, that I didn’t know what to do about. Ultimately I created a script that would filter out all the movement by people in the images so the work could be shown in galleries and museums. Given that this was pre-Edward Snowden, pre-Cambridge Analytica, etc., people read it as a kind of activist work, warning about the dangers to privacy posed by the web, connecting your living room to the entire world potentially. Now, of course, everyone knows about it, and so that reading is less significant, but I find there to be a poetic quality to the empty interiors it depicts, and it reflects a kind of melancholy I felt at the time, wondering who all these people were, what they were making of my work. What did it all mean? Was there any value in any of it? I think there is, but a lot of that meaning is personal. 

Reflecting on the darker and more corporate turn the internet has taken in recent years, I’ve decided that what might have been a valid artistic position thirteen years ago has taken a different meaning now, and so I’ve deactivated the work at the present. 

Ethereal Self & Others

Zwour

Thursday, April 25 2019, 23:40:34 CET

Wednesday, April 24 2019, 17:37:10 CET

Selected editions of generative animations. Artworks were offered in collaborations with left gallery, Upstream Gallery, and Lohaus Sominsky. Some of these were acquired by institutional art collections such as the ZKM Karlsruhe and the Kadist Foundation.

Software

Remastered to 4K in 2025, duration 8 minutes. Edition 3+1AP. To be installed alongside a noise generator playing soft pink noise.

<a href='https://eu-central-1.linodeobjects.com/harm/_1wtZu7XRc7LTn43J3hDA/Exotica-remastered-01-2025.mp4'>Download (600MB)</a>

*Everyone is trying to get to the bar.*   
*The name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven.*   
*The band in Heaven plays my favorite song.*   
*They play it once again, they play it all night long.*   
   
*Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.*   
*Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.*   


Exotica

Created with the Lexachast algorithm, 2019

Edition of 100

<a href="https://objkt.com/tokens/KT1LjmAdYQCLBjwv4S2oFkEzyHVkomAf5MrW/28990" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View on objkt.com</a>

Träuma

Created with the Lexachast algorithm, 2019

Edition of 100

<a href="https://objkt.com/tokens/KT1LjmAdYQCLBjwv4S2oFkEzyHVkomAf5MrW/28817" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View on objkt.com</a>

CPTSD

Layered and nested rounded squares, radial and linear gradients, colours tend to green and blue.

By Harm van den Dorpel, 2022

Activity

Blockade