Mutant Garden

The Painter's New Tools

Pattern & Presence

Asking for a Friend

Vertiginous Data

Proof of Work

E-State Realisms

Just-in-Time

Stedelijk Base

Mutant Garden Tracer

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

Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Mutant Garden Autobreeder

Everything is true if you believe hard enough

A website where users can live breed and mutate specimen.

Mutant Garden Website

Autobreeder (single screen)

hyphenation is a typographic operation: by dividing words (usually at the end of a line on a page) with a dash ("-"), information can be fit efficiently on a piece of paper. the written word is chopped up, based on semi-systematic hyphenation rules, that mimic the sound in our minds, when we trace and pronounce the words with our eyes.

unlike paper, on the internet there are no finite bounds. text can flow freely on the screen, expanded by scrollbars. in this work, an automated computer voice is programmed to (clumsily) read out the word segments. this brings the text on the webpage back to its printed predecessor, and from print back to spoken word.


Hyphenation xyz

Dark Calendar .com

Algues Artificielles

Nested Exchange

Hybrid Vigor .bio

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

Lexachast

eAR is a location-based augmented reality sound and text piece in the form of first-person fiction. It presents a series of dramatized field recordings from a digitally mediated environment together with commentary inspired by the Let's Play format.

Sound by Ville Haimala, text by Jenna Sutela, design and programming by Harm van den Dorpel. 

eAR (PAN 72)

Online and edition of 2+1AP

Music by Bill Kouligas

Transplant

Deli Near .Info

A generative online artist studio.

Connections between text and images are generated by manual training. I made a page that showed me 3 items ad random, from which I had to eliminate one that intuitively belonged the least in this set of 3. From all these dismissive dissociations, the mathematical inverse was calculated, which would supposedly reveal unconsciously the most interesting and relevant associations.

<a href='https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/harm-van-den-dorpel-dissociations' target='_blank'>At the New Museum</a>

Dissociations

Ethereal Self .com

Ethereal Others .com

Ethereal Others (When No One is Looking)

When Adobe decided to kill its Flash Player in 2020, instantly a rich heritage of early interactive animations and net art disappeared from our web browsers (and our collective memory).

Among those this interactive animation which I made while still in art school around 2004. I believe I called it "Pseudo Psycho" at the time, in response to obligatory ceramics classes.

It's ironic how much smoother and perfect these animations rendered back then as computed vector graphics, compared to the ugly lossy & glitchy encoded video offered by Instagram now in 2022.

Pseudo Psycho

Markov was a Russian mathematician (1856 - 1922) who is best known for his work on chance. He described the so called “Markov Chain”: a simple method to calculate the probability of something new happening, by looking only at the current situation, and ignoring events in the past. This is sometimes characterized as “memorylessness”.

The composition starts off as a single square, filling the whole screen. This square can split into multiple segments, it might change its colour, or it might rotate 45°. Each of these changes in appearance have a particular chance of happening, purely based on their current state.

A square can subdivide into sub-squares, which in turn can split into other segments, and so forth. This could potentially happen infinite times. The property of nested subdivision is called “recursivity”, and is commonly found in software development, architecture and linguistics.

By defining only a few simple probabilistic rules the artist created a system that can achieve a very complex composition. Whereas Mondriaan might have made many studies and versions to reach one single best possible composition, this work instead embraces perpetual change.


Software