It's with great pleasure that I can invite you to my upcoming solo exhibition "Mutant Garden" at [Upstream Gallery Amsterdam](https://www.upstreamgallery.nl/exhibitions/198/mutant-garden). This body of work has developed (sometimes on its own) over the past 2.5 years and will now be exhibited in its entirety for the first time.

Open from the **23rd of April**. To visit, please [book a reservation with the gallery](https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-harm-van-den-dorpel-mutant-garden-polakvanbekkum-fronting-motion-149702852261) in advance. 

### Exhibition Text

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 also the interview with Julian, to be published soon) 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.

---

Many thanks to Paloma Rodríguez Carrington, Lisa Blanning, Wassim Alsindi, William Kherbek, and the wonderful team at Upstream Gallery.


Mutant Garden

A series of early works - the oldest one being from 2005 - will be made available for purchase for the first time this weekend. This [NFT drop](/news/tokenizing-sustainability) includes 3 editioned pixel sorters, encoded to animated GIF.

The offering has been curated by Folia, who have also recently minted work by Petra Cortright, Hesaitix, Travess Smalley and  Oliver Laric (coming up).

To participate in the bidding visit the [Folia website](https://www.folia.app/sets/pixel-sorters).

Starting Saturday the 20th, 9PM CET.

[Folia Substack](https://folia.substack.com/)   
[Pixel Sorters Series](/series/pixel-sorters)   

Vintage NFT drop

It's fascinating and exciting (and at times demoralizing) to follow the surging interest in NFTs (non-fungible tokens).  People have approached me asking for my opinion on them, given that I run [left gallery](https://left.gallery). So, here is my highly personal and entirely subjective take on the matter.

### History

I minted my first NFTs in 2015 with the help of the now defunct [ascribe.io](https://www.ascribe.io/). Their pioneering service allowed creators to upload their work, mint editions on the Bitcoin blockchain, and to transfer them as tokens when sold.

Even though, at the time, this sounded like an abstract and intangible fad, the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna did buy 20 tokenized editions of my work, [Event Listeners](https://left.gallery/work/event-listeners), through the marketplace [Cointemporary](https://twitter.com/cointemporary). The Museum paid with Bitcoin, which made it a historical transaction: it was the first time a museum bought NFTs, and paid with a cryptocurrency. The event gained quite some [media attention](https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/mak-vienna-becomes-first-museum-to-acquire-art-using-bitcoin-a-harm-van-den-dorpel-3995/), and, gradually, all my 100 editions were sold to collectors and another museum.

This unexpected success inspired my partner, [Paloma Rodríguez Carrington](http://frameshift.berlin/), and me to start our own marketplace for blockchain ascribed artworks: [left gallery](https://left.gallery). We would sell "downloadable objects'' in large editions for low prices. Customers could pay with crypto, PayPal, or credit card, and, after purchase, we would manually transfer the token belonging to their purchase to those clients interested in having them – most didn't understand what a blockchain was at all.

The insights of ascribe.io were radical and definitely ahead of their time. Unfortunately, the state of blockchain technology then was not mature enough to support their business model; ascribe stopped offering their service around 2017, and they pivoted to become a database company. 

Although the token provenance information that ascribe stored on the immutable Bitcoin blockchain will always remain there, in practice, we have lost access to it, as their web interface to retrieve it was discontinued. So, in 2018, I bit the bullet and deployed my first [ERC721 smart contract](http://erc721.org/) and I minted Ethereum tokens for the editions that had been sold. I asked owners to send me their Ethereum wallet address in order to transfer them the tokens for the editions they owned. This was, in itself, an "interesting" situation, because this meant that some editions were now tokenized on two blockchains at once.

To my disappointment, when I announced this new Ethereum website integration, few buyers actually requested the token belonging to their purchase. Sales on left gallery continued, but interest in ERC721 tokens kept declining among our clientele. At the same time, the transaction costs kept increasing, to a degree where the costs for minting and transferring tokens exceeded the sales price of the actual artworks by orders of magnitude.

### 2020

Then came COVID19. The income of my partner and I dropped significantly, as we had fewer clients and the art market was on hold. This unusual moment created the opportunity to redevelop the left gallery website (from scratch) using new technology, and support ourselves and other artists by increasing gallery revenue.

As only a few buyers in the previous years had shown interest in owning an NFT for their purchase, I hesitated to implement an integration with the Ethereum blockchain _again_. This meant that left gallery now became a regular online marketplace where ownership records were stored in a regular database. I was proud of what we had achieved with the left gallery relaunch, and I was amazed by all the works that artists offered on it, but also it hurt, because left gallery had lost some of its "blockchain soul".

### 2021

To my surprise a renewed interest in NFTs emerged in the first quarter of 2021, which, to be honest, initially annoyed me. In my humble opinion, the works now offered as NFTs were not very interesting, or just plain ugly. Why were people suddenly willing to pay so much Ether for such bad "art", while they often hesitated to pay for the affordable, non-NFT artworks on left gallery? It seemed to me this hype surrounding NFTs was not grounded in a genuine appreciation of the artworks.

Still, the rush toward NFTs turned out to be an opportunity for me as well, as I had some old, and newer, artworks that never found their ways to art collectors, but which suddenly very well fitted the editioning, format, and price range of NFTs. So I did profit from this second(?) wave of NFT. However, as the general interest in NFTs has grown explosively, so did questions about its environmental impact.

### Waste

I find it hard to judge exactly how wasteful the Ethereum blockchain is, and how, in relative terms, environmentally destructive it is compared to, for example, the Google data centres that power our daily search queries, or CI/CD pipelines, or credit card payment networks, etc. I wonder why the preponderance of general opinion questions their use of electricity much less than that of NFTs. Many people lack a deep technical understanding of computing: they do not realise that there are many other (non-NFT) smart contracts running on the same blockchain, and the popularity of NFTs does not correlate to the general energy use of the validators. Were all artists to abandon Ethereum en masse, it would not make our planet greener.

However, I think that it’s hard to deny that the current Ethereum blockchain is wasteful _by design_. The "proof-of-work" (PoW) consensus algorithm ingests huge amounts of electricity to crunch meaningless mathematical riddles, which secure the network from fraudulent transactions. Additionally, PoW is limited in the amount of transactions it can process per second, and transaction costs can become ridiculously high.

These limitations have been known since the inception of the Ethereum blockchain, and its developer community has already gone a long way in replacing the PoW algorithm with another algorithm: proof-of-stake (PoS). I will spare readers my attempts to explain how these two algorithms differ technically, but the takeaway is that PoS does not depend on computing power to solve random math puzzles, and, therefore, burns far less electricity than PoW. A blockchain running on a PoS algorithm can handle many more transactions in a given amount of time; transaction costs might be low, or even zero. Even though PoS is not a silver bullet, it is my understanding that abandoning PoW in favour of PoS will improve on the environmental issues associated with NFTs.

### Future

The Ethereum website [promises to complete the transition](https://ethereum.org/zh/eth2/) to proof-of-stake in 2022, which will "signal the end of energy-intensive mining". This is hopeful, but how can we be sure they will meet this deadline? Are there feasible alternatives?

I was delighted when our [funding application was granted](https://interchain-io.medium.com/icf-q2-2020-funding-recipients-e5cbb326c23c) by the Interchain Foundation for the development of an "application-specific" proof-of-stake blockchain. Where Ethereum hosts many unrelated applications all on one blockchain (competing for scarce resources), an application-specific blockchain consists of only one application, fine-tuned to its unique requirements. We will be developing such a blockchain using the Cosmos SDK. The long-term vision of the Cosmos community includes connecting many of these isolated blockchains, forming an “Internet of blockchains”.

We will eventually find out if the current renewed enthusiasm for NFTs will stabilise and form a sustainable market that will benefit artists over the long term. Practically, I will continue to use the Ethereum blockchain for selected artworks, in anticipation of the announced transition to the environmentally more sustainable PoS algorithm, while simultaneously developing our own light-weight blockchain.

– Harm van den Dorpel, edited by William Kherbek


Tokenizing Sustainability

It's with great pleasure that I can release my [new online archive of my work](https://harm.work/)!

As it's currently impossible to organise a vernissage and celebrate, I thought it would be nice to commission my long time favourite DJ Carten Jost ([Dial](https://www.dial-rec.de/)) to compose a bespoke mix as background music while browsing this website. You can play it using the widget bottom right, or listen to it on [Soundcloud](https://soundcloud.com/harmvddorpel/a-field-without-boundaries).

This website is released in conjunction with my exhibition "[A Field Without Boundaries](/news/upcoming-solo-exhibition-shimmer-rotterdam)", at Shimmer Rotterdam, who generously supported this initiative.

Brand New Website

Very honoured that three of my works from the Algues Artificielles series entered the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

[See the Algues Artificielles series](/series/algues-artificielles)

Three works enter permanent collection V&A London

I will present a back-catalogue of works made over the past few years. Starting in February 2021, Shimmer will regularly ‘refresh’ the exhibition.

[More info on Shimmer Website](http://shimmershimmer.org/chapter-2-a-field-without-boundaries-by-harm-van-den-dorpel/)

News

Mutant Garden @ Upstream Gallery

Vintage NFT drop

Tokenizing Sustainability

Brand New Website

3 works enter V&A collection

Exhibition Shimmer Rotterdam