Senescenence

Generative animations published as on-chain NFTs, alongside plotter drawings made from their outputs.

The work is built on a cellular automaton in the tradition of Conway's Game of Life — but of a different kind. Where Conway sets out a minimal rule that decides whether each cell lives or dies, Stained Unravel gives its cells a far larger vocabulary: 23 morphological states they can inhabit, acted on by three mechanisms from which birth, survival, and death emerge as consequences rather than as prescribed rules.

The algorithm is described in full on the <a href='https://dissociations.com/wiki/stained-unravel' target='_blank'>Dissociations</a> website.

Stained Unravel

Monochrome Drawings

Suite of eight monochrome plotter drawings. The mechanical plotter and the calligraphy brush introduce subtle variation in direction, stroke width, and ink density, so no two are identical.

Edition of 20   
Signed and stamped

Monochrome Drawings Edition

Angles Morts

Cloud Writings

Series of plotter drawings that extend Hanne Darboven's <a href='https://www.mercedes-benz.art/en/artwork/konstruktionen-new-york-hanne-darboven-new-york-196667-2/' target='_blank'>Konstruktionen</a> (1966) through interpolation. For each work, the lines of an existing Darboven construction are traced, and software then computes the lines that would lie between them — drawing out a continuum the original only implied. The results are plotted onto millimeter paper.

Interpolations

Ongoing series of plotter drawings on paper and PVC. Premiered in the exhibition <a href='https://harm.work/exhibition/angles-morts/all'>Angles Morts</a>.

Struggle for Pleasure

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

Our Inner Child

Series of pixel "paintings" constructed by recursively subdividing squares.

> "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."



Resolution Paintings

Mutant Garden

Uninnocent Bystander

The Painter's New Tools

Okazaki, Sakamoto, van den Dorpel, Murayama

Context Switch

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.

Notes on Objects

Hand- and CNC-cut brown paper bags; interpretations of lithographies by Hans Arp. 

Bags

Pattern and Presence

Proof of Work

Vertiginous Data

E-State Realisms

The works in ‘Nested Exchange’ could be thought of as ‘information works’ as much as art works. The individual specimens find their form by a process of information exchange with each other. The images are connected via nodes in a nested structure. They ‘communicate’ by the flipping of a node within the structure which then creates a new equilibrium in the system which affects everything that comes afterward. Nodes communicate - or gossip - with each other. The imperative of the work is to produce the greatest diversity possible, so each specimen is driven to be as different as it can be from those around it (I've also called this my "hipster algorithm"). 

There are a number of themes that come into play in a work like ‘Nested Exchange’. The specimens are configured in nested recursive ‘tree’ structures similar to those used in the first iterations of Chomskyan linguistics. Ultimately, the output of these exchanges are different from language in a number of ways. One of the most divergent features is that in the work no new information - per se - is produced, but existing information is recombined toward an optimally diverse distribution. The nest is a kind of open and closed system at once, recursive, and, therefore, functionally infinite, but also radically constrained. The system records its changes between states as ‘snapshots’, leaving a complete history of itself in a manner similar to a blockchain ledger.   

Nested Exchange

Asking for a Friend

During the summer of 2016, I spent a few weeks with my family by sea in 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?

I devised a system in which the drawings - consisting of multiple lines and shapes - would evolve and improve over time. In many iterations, the system would give me a generation of works; each time I would pick two from which more ‘children’ would be bred. Because the breeding always happens between ‘siblings’ - a sort of mechanical incest - the diversity would gradually converge.

Technically (or biologically?), all properties of a drawing (angles, smoothness, shape, colour, transparency, scale, position, etc.) are stored in a long sequence of 0s and 1s: a digital genome. These genomes hermetically define the appearance (or phenotype) of each work (or specimen).

When two people (or, in this case, two drawings) are selected and mate, both of their chromosomes are aligned, and ad-random genes are selected from either parent (crossover). From this game of recombination, both iterative and diverse offspring emerge.

The process of selecting candidates for breeding, examining the results, and using those results to further breed to eliminate or emphasise particular traits in animals and flowers is called 'hybrid vigour'.  My website, 'Hybrid Vigor’, is publicly accessible to crowd-source this process in an evolutionarily selective way, using the internet visitor as the fitness function.

Algues Artificielles

The automated drawings are a series of works that were born out of being in the studio. The title of the series could be interpreted as a nod to the "[automatic drawings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_automatism)" made by the surrealists.

Often when I’m creating serial works, I make different series at the same time. For example, when I was working on ‘Death Imitates Language’ I was making drawings, too. In the case of these, they came about when I would have certain small ideas, formal explorations, I suppose it would be best to call them. I would get started on them, and just seeing them on the screen or printed by a laser printer seemed to leave them a little flat and lifeless to me, not dynamic enough. I wanted to make them a bit more ‘live’, and, so, ironically, I introduced a machinic dimension.

I would set up a plotter that would begin drawing with a ballpoint pen, and then I would interfere in the drawing process. Sometimes I would pull out the pen or change the pen in the plotter as it was moving. It resulted in some very interesting effects. I particularly liked cases when, for instance, there would be horizontal line, and then a vertical line, and the movement of the plotter would displace the ink that hadn’t dried in the previous line. This created pleasant, unexpected painterly qualities. In a way, these are quite classical works, concerned with form and the temporal dimension - they take a lot of time to create which allows me to get bored and experiment with the process. They are something like classical cyborg art works. 

Automated Drawings

Wer nicht denken will, fliegt raus

In the years leading up to ‘Death Imitates Language’, I was trying more and more to be an ‘artist artist’, someone who fitted into the gallery space and the art markets in conventional terms. I had some success, but I also had a sense of sadness about the process. It felt a bit hollow and disconnected from the Net Art which I saw myself as coming out of. For a while, I thought about turning away from the art world and doing what I really enjoyed most, which was programming. While I was in this unsettled period, I was doing a lot of generative graphics, but I was somewhat bored. I felt like the graphics needed a bit more development and direction to add to the randomness created by the programmes. 

It was around this time that I saw a video by the programmer, philosopher and general provocateur, Vinay Gupta, about algorithms and dating apps. Gupta estimated that Tinder and similar apps were responsible for essentially engineering about 10% of the dates that took place in the countries where the app was used. The idea of a dating app that works ‘too well’ and ends up in a long term relationship was a serious risk for the apps’ business models, or so Gupta argues. Apparently companies decided that for their purposes it was better to use machine learning and AI to engineer the algorithm to bring people together who were likely to feel attraction, but whose relationships were also likely to be volatile. I started thinking about what might happen if a child was conceived in one of these short and sharp relationships. That child’s biology would be, in part, algorithmically determined. The biopolitics of that were quite a lot to get my head around, but it did give me a direction for the graphics project, an idea that breeding aesthetic populations might also provide a way to visualise how machines understand data and ‘create’, and how art might emerge from that process. The work has now gone on for some time; probably longer than a lot of the relationships that gave me the idea in the first place.

A series of works exploring the development of meaning in generative aesthetics using micro feedback and a genetic algorithm. It consists of a website and a series of printed and boxed collage works.

The public website contains an enormous population of speculative works. Each of these works are generated by inheriting sequences of information - a sort of DNA - from their 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 me: micro feedback or 'likes'. 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 translated into physical objects. These objects are layered in construction, partly transparent and square. They can be hung and watched from all sides.

[Featured in Rhizome's Net Art Anthology](https://anthology.rhizome.org/death-imitates-language)

Death Imitates Language

Just-in-Time

This series of whiteboard can be considered depositions of the (user) uploaded content of the social media platform [Deli Near Info](/work/deli-near-info). At the time I was thinking a lot about the discrepancy between traditional art making which values the production of immutable, monumental objects, and the development of software and online publishing, which always remain somewhat fluid, and never fully reach  completion, or conclusion.

Whiteboards aid the collaborative process of software teams, by visualizing methodologies like 'scrum' or 'kanban'. They can always be erased, and their drawings are often complemented with magnets that stick to the surface, but never permanently.

These whiteboards can always be reconfigured, and information could be added, or removed at will, which complicated their functioning as art objects.

Delinear Whiteboards

A series of hanging sculptures made from UV printed heatshrink foil and other packaging materials.

Chrysalis Sculptures

About

 I Was Raised on the Internet

Assemblages dates to the time shortly after I graduated from art school. At that time my friends and I were often experiencing artworks through the images posted on sites like Contemporary Art Daily. The images we saw were of pristine spaces with perfectly realised works. I wondered how it would be if I rendered the exhibitions using 3-D software - programmes like Cinema 4-D were among the programmes I used for the works. Once I created these renders, I could post them and see if they would be featured on the blogs alongside the exhibition views on which they were based. 

The idea worked a little too well. A gallerist in London saw the images online and she liked them. Thinking they were IRL works, she asked if she could show them. It was a very generative dilemma. I could either admit they were digital works and had no physical dimension, or I could create the works IRL. I decided to accept the challenge, and it was challenging. The works are spheres, the easiest shapes to create digitally. It’s three clicks, assigning an image as a texture on a sphere and then making adjustments. To make the same shape in physical material is among the hardest things you can do.

For the surfaces, I printed some images from Google image searches - mostly textures from ready-made render kits. I chose mostly images that represented complex systems, network cables, intestines, whatever I could find that was interlocking and complex. The works became sculptures about the ways in which systems fit together, interpenetrate, and elude each other. The sphere is a kind of container, but also a fixed border, holding these complexities in tension and in place, not least the complexities behind their own creation. 

Assemblages

I wondered, when enlarging low resolution bitmap images, if it were possible to come up with an alternative to square rectangular pixels. Why not extrapolate the connections between enlarged pixels diagonally? This resulted in new textures, while remaining perhaps more truthful to the original structure and composition.

These images were calculated in 2009 and minted in 2022.

Diagonal Enlargements

A set of four short videos that sit between photograph and film. The title names the effect literally: the small breeze a codec makes. Each work is a still photograph in which only the parts that might be alive have been set moving, not by filming them but by pushing them through a low resolution compression algorithm.

<a href='https://dissociations.com/wiki/codec-breeze' target='_blank'>More information...</a>

Codec Breeze

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

These are some of my earliest works to receive a (somewhat) wide audience. The works date from 2007. This was a time when artists were first getting excited about the ready availability of images they could access just by doing Google searches. The images were high quality, and often rather clinical. In their apparent simplicity, they were easy to manipulate, like sampling a song where the first bar is just drums. The stills are the first part in a series of images including black and white animated GIFs and other animations. 

Using animals as the subjects for the images also lent itself to the overall generic quality. The images were more indexical in nature rather than being portraits in the way they would be if they were of humans, or, for example, of specific pets posed for the shot. They were just of “animals”.

The works resurfaced in my consciousness recently when they started appearing in posts on Instagram - uncredited, I might add. The goat, in particular, proved to be very popular. People thought the images were very funny and they liked them, but when they found out the effects were created in software, they were disappointed. They thought I’d done them photographically with exposure effects, but, in fact, it was all a function of settings and filters. In that the images could be thought of as “pure products” of the internet - the result of simple googling and downloading Photoshop illegally - this genericness of their creation appeals to me and fits with the overall tenor of the project as I understood it.

Animal Configurations

The works in this series have an uncanny quality for me on multiple levels. In the first sense, the images themselves touch on the strange ways our minds work when we see the human body. The source images for these works were all found photographs. The images are all of people who are seen sleeping (or, quite likely, passed out). In composing some of them, I simply animated the prone bodies and then filled in the space where they were lying with some crude Photoshop work. In seeing the works, I was stunned at the way that once the body parts were animated and had assembled themselves, the images gave the sensation of seeing an actual body move. It certainly brought me into an awareness of my own body and the materiality of it, but also, in a curious and estranged way, a sense of the body itself as animate while simultaneously being an object, capable of independent mobility, but also capable of merging - categorically - with objects like furniture. 

These images are also uncanny for me in that while they are both animate and inanimate - ‘moving still’ is the term I use for them - they are also lodged in an unresolved space between video works and photographs. I originally made the works using Adobe Flash. They were intended to be seen on websites, and, therefore, become a moving image on an page of otherwise still images. That sense of the unexpected was crucial, for me to their meaning. Now that websites are no longer such a central part of the way people interact with the internet, these works have lost a significant aspect of their context, but that alienation, I think, lends them another kind of significance. 

When I made these images, most of the people who were discussing my work came from the world of photography, but now, when they are shown, people see them as ‘video art’. I definitely never conceived of them in terms of being video art, as the expectations around video and movement are very different. For my own part, I see them as a form of collage from the Net Art age, using the found images, cutting, and recombining of traditional collage, but without gluing and with a dynamic rather than static composition.  

The titles are somewhat ironic, but they also have a personal dimension. My father is a theologian in the Netherlands, and the Christian connotations of ‘resurrection’ are a part of the range of references the works encompass. Perhaps that is an aspect of why they are so uncanny to me, the ways in which they gesture toward things I can apprehend but not fully comprehend. 


Revenant Series

Stedelijk Base

Andrey Markov was a mathematician who was interested in randomness. In the jargon of probability theory, a mathematical object defined by a set of random variables is known as a ‘stochastic process’. Markov became interested in how much you could know about a stochastic process, and in his research he developed a model we now call the ‘Markov process’ – some people refer to it as a ‘Markov chain’. The Markov process examines the state of a system at a given time and attempts to project the next state of that system based on existing relationships.

[Read article about this series...](https://markovs-dream.harm.work/about)

Series