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

By Harm van den Dorpel, 2023

On-chain rotating nested squircles by Harm van den Dorpel, 2022

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

Fully on-chain animated proto-seeder by Harm van den Dorpel

Pattern and Presence

Nested Exchange

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

Struggle for Pleasure

Processed images from metal, grunge & shoegaze memories. An addendum to, or spill over from the Struggle for Pleasure series. Four of these are materialized as wall pieces. Released in collaboration with Verse SOLOS, curated by Leyla Fakhr.

Swallow, only Shallow

A Vale of Tears

Vortex

Person in a Field

Creation of Light

A series of twelve works released in conjunction with my [solo exhibition](https://harm.work/exhibition/struggle-for-pleasure) at Verse, London. Four of these are material works, eight released exclusively as Ethereum NFT.

These are created with a similar image subdivision algorithm as "Struggle for Pleasure", but instead of making the decisions of which pixel operation to employ, or how to calculate the next colour in a geometric generative fashion, I fed it existing found images.

The colours are sampled from these underlying images and undergo algorithmic operations in multiple colour spaces, like bit shifting, channel swapping (and some post production).

This series is called "Swallow, Only Shallow", which are 2 song titles from My Bloody Valentine combined. The series is heavily inspired by the complex textures of distortion in Shoegaze music and turned out quite psychedelic.


Swallow, Only Shallow

Mutant Garden Autobreeder

Group exhibition.

[More information](https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2021/12/biomedia)

BioMedia: The Age of Media with Life-like Behavior

Markov's Dream

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

Markov's Window

My work Markov's Window is 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

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

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

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

Dissociations .com

https://eu-central-1.linodeobjects.com/harm/SamKHtZWoby1anXVaKlTe/triplet.html

Say, we imagine a set of things in front of us. This set could have the shape of a cloud. The members of the cloud are the result of our attempts. They are connected to each other. Some connections are weak, some are strong, some attract, some repel.

In absolute terms it's difficult to say what does and what does not really belong together.

It would be more adequate to speak about their associations in relative terms: some elements are more related than others.

For example, let's take a set of three: *Palindrome*, *Twelve*, and *Energy Drink*.

The Energy Drink stands out for some particular criteria (possible to observe without requiring a definition of similarity). Because of this Twelve and Palindrome are automatically related, and there are negative ties to Energy Drink. Effectively three new relations have now been defined, and we have not sought refuge to seemingly unavoidable proxies such as categories, groups, tags, etc.

(Formulating coherence criteria using written language always reduces essential complexity because this language requires a mode of representation and interpretation)

The complex graph of 'weighted' connections is permanently incomplete. Taxonomies are ridiculous: there is no map, no overview, no complete model. Every node has character, partially (but maybe completely) defined by it's associations. Identity is deferred. We are somewhere, we can navigate elsewhere, and the destination emerges from our move. It wasn't there before and we weren't there (…) and upon arrival its novelty fades immediately.

(Originally published on [Dissociations](http://dissociations.com/952))

Dissociations

One night, while walking on Kottbusser Tor, I noticed all of the windows of the Commerzbank had been kicked in.

The treacly safety glass, armed by its viscosity, hadn’t collapsed to the attack though, but rather developed into intricate monochrome kaleidoscopes.

In between the glass and a crooked Luxaflex, hardly attractive yellow advertisements hung from aluminium cables (far too strong for their load): Zufriedenheit garantiert & Die Bank an Ihrer Seite.

It was only the day after that I realised the potential of the setup. But when I came back the windows had been replaced, the blinds straightened and the ads unchanged. My new Canon also remained untouched in my Muji backpack and I felt even more useless carrying a tripod around.

Back in my studio I summarised the situation in a few Google Image Search keywords to serendipitously find ‘Mannequins in broken shop window’. This would become the texture for my new sculpture.

Since I recently migrated to Berlin, the Deutsche Bank had not approved my credit score for a credit card yet. I decided to use the lively watermarked stock photo instead, as I could not legally acquire the image from the image bank.

This digital image to my (supposed) disposal was 1300 pixels wide and 867 high, and depicted two pale mannequins in black tuxedos, standing in a shopping window behind a huge crack in the glass (also take note of a plastic lily in the bottom right corner). Still visible in the disrupted reflection some Toyota Prius Taxis. This all overlaid with the earlier mentioned watermark (Photoshop blending mode ‘lighten’).

The aspect ratio of the image was 2 to 1, so I decided to have it printed 2 by 1 meter (which is roughly 79 x 39 inch). For it to still look good when printed on this larger scale, I had to pump it up to remain sharp, in a similar way the detectives of Law & Order SVU get their CCTV images of rapists enhanced.

The software to do this couldn’t be purchased without a credit card either so my unregistered version of ‘PhotoZoom Pro 5’ also added its watermark.

I convinced the man at the print shop this really was the image I wanted UV-printed on PET-G.

While assembling the sculpture it seemed undoubtedly the best decision to leave the protective foil on.

---

Installed as part of the exhibition <a href='https://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/art-post-internet/' target='_blank'>"Art Post-Internet"</a> at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijng. This sculpture was lost by the museum and never found back.

Activity

Blush Array II

Venster #80

Diagnostics

Orb (lite) #364

Markov's Dream

Mother of Pearl

Stained

De Stijl

Night

Game

Spring

Untitled

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