Dissociations

Catalog of all wiki pages. Updated on every ingest or new page creation.

About

• About — Dissociations — what this site is; the 2010 mechanism (triadic elimination, interval space); Warburg lineage; the 2026 LLM mutation; how to navigate

Synthesis

• The Generative Threshold — An Overall Thesis — the central philosophical claim across two decades; taste externalised (Dissociations → Quantizer); compression/decompression; memory and the memoryless; the grid's autonomy; four underdeveloped territories; the future work

Concepts

• Recursion and Self-Reference — self-containing definitions; radical autonomy as self-enclosure; the stop-condition problem; mise en abyme, the documentation formula, the recursive title, feedback loops; the Endless Knot (2024) as iconographic samsara — Tibetan Buddhist Ashtamangala rendered through a hatching algorithm with yellow oxidization passages; 901's "endless struggle" as the secular translation of saṃsāra (→ 876, 878, 992, 854, 856, 901, 976)

• The Lozenge — Modernist Tilted Geometry — the 45° square-tipped-onto-corner as a recurring formal device: Malevich's Black Square as foundational square-as-archetype; Mondriaan's tableau-losange as the Theosophy/Neoplasticism solution to his no-diagonals rule; the Mondriaan/Doesburg break over Counter-Compositions as the marker of where diagonals are admitted; Jan Dibbets' Perspective Corrections / Collage as the Dutch epistemological pressure-test in ironic dialogue with Mondriaan — the lozenge as the form of the question Mondriaan thought it was the answer to; Markov's Window (2004), Venster (2024, on-chain sequel — 100 generative animated recursive SVG compositions, lozenge as categorical trait, in collaboration with Bright Moments; venster is the Dutch word for window, retitling the 2004 work in the artist's mother tongue and selecting the architectural register over the domestic raam), and Endless Knot (2024, lozenge through inherited Buddhist iconography); the lozenge as refusal of the responsive social-media square; the frame-as-aperture as a recursive gesture

• Semiotic Square — New/Old/Different/Same and its negations; the N→∞ matrix of artistic practice; relevance as the displaced problem (→ 901, 1010, 909, 912)

• Assemblage Identity — contingent, historically emergent identity; individual singularities; the tension between categorization and particularity; the "everything vs. anything" problem (→ 639, 952, 581, 912, 1301)

• Randomness and Pattern — information as pattern; randomness as its absence; workmanship of uncertainty; chance as method (→ 805, 609, 709, 846, 852, 878)

• Mediation and the Archive — the archive transforms what it records; flickering signifiers; the work as accumulated mediation; documentation as constitutive (→ 1301, 837, 805, 992, 846)

• Impulse, Risk, and Method — discovery vs. decision; the deepest impulse; reverse engineering; navigation as ontology (→ 793, 709, 609, 952)

• Subconscious Computation — the algorithm as device for following the deepest impulse; feedback loops as design; net art lineage; craft enabling non-arbitrary surprise (→ 709, 793, 952, 609)

• Protocol, Taste, and Systems — taste as the through-line (personal → collective → systemic); Dissociations as training data; Delinear.info and 952; Markov melancholia; permanence of change; making protocols desirable (→ Droitcour 2025, 709, 952, 992)

• Quantization and Dithering — quantization defined; dithering algorithms (Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson, Sierra3…); historical palettes as computational strata (CGA, ZX Spectrum, Apple II); Quantizer (2025) as the primary work; voluntary constraint; impermanence and refusal of immutability; Nethermind / Nethermind Quilt / Anobium as protocol-to-ink relay

• Afterimage — visual and aural persistence after stimulus ends; Duchamp's Rotoreliefs; Markov's Dream #10 (Rotorelief) and #9 (Hedphelym); Struggle for Pleasure "Relieved Afterimage" and "Loveless"; shoegaze, tinnitus as aural afterimage — quantization defined; dithering algorithms (Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson, Sierra3…); historical palettes as computational strata (CGA, ZX Spectrum, Apple II); Quantizer (2025) as the primary work; voluntary constraint; impermanence and refusal of immutability

• Openness — Release Early, Release Often — Eric Raymond's open source credo as artistic stance; frequent release, feedback loops, medium permeability; tension with recursion's self-enclosure; Abrons Arts Center 2013; dissociations.com as data-mining tool (→ 729, 876, 992, 1035)

• Limit Experience — Bataille, Agamben, and Chemsex Benelux — Chemsex Benelux (2022) and the two NFT collections released under it: Indiscreet Units (266+ hue-rotating flags) and Phantom Crush (130 generative portraits with Enver Hadzijaj); the about-text quote ("souvenirs to help you integrate the limit-experiences you never had"); Jonas Čeika's video essay on Bataille named in note 3005 as the inspiration; what Čeika's four moves are; what notes 1266 (Agamben on the integrally profane order), 805 (Hayles on the flickering signifier, with the embedded intimate fragment), and 837 (Derrida on the archive) say (→ 3005, 805, 837, 1266, Čeika 2018 transcript)

• The Squircle — Impure Geometry and the Ideology of Interface — mathematical impurity (superellipse, why n=4 has no intrinsic justification); the humanising ideology of rounded corners; Malevich's square inverted; sacred geometry as the language of capitalism; occupation rather than refusal

• Process Legibility — Construction as Image — "the construction of an image is the image"; criterion vs. code (what AI cannot replicate); "tested not executed"; aging vs. beauty (Franke); against seamlessness as position (→ Stained Unravel text, 992, 709, 609, 793)

• Evolutionary Logic — Cartesian Genetic Programming; fitness functions; non-coding genes as latent archive; death as selection pressure; "life is a 3.5 billion year old technology"; algorithmic archaeology (→ CGP Miller interview, Spike #70, 709, 609, 952)

• Senescenence (exhibition, 2026) — cellular automaton / Game of Life; death as system feature not failure; loom genealogy (weaving → pixel → GPU); sacred geometry; "less composed than initiated"; temporary negotiations with impermanence (→ press release, 709, 609, 952, 876)

• Stained Unravel — the cellular automaton system: 23-state morphological vocabulary; three mechanisms (positional bitmap compare, temporal colour staining, edge merging); birth/survival/death as consequences not rules; plotter drawings as hatching-algorithm translations (→ 3000, 3001); the seven works described

• The Markov's Dream Palette — A Lineage — a single hand-picked palette (pure RGB blue, green, magenta, black-white) first used 2004, returned to in Markov's Dream (2022), Markov's Window 2023, and Stained Unravel (2026); palette as memory vs. Markov memorylessness; constructivist room at Stedelijk (→ 3002)

• Meditative Labour — Hand, Plotter, Code, Prompt — the four-drawing sequence Kapitulation (2024) → Beads (2025) → Beads II (2025) → Beads III (2025) read as a ladder between hand and machine; weaving as labour-form; coding as the second meditative loom; LLM-assisted programming as the moment when the keyboard-loom thins out and the hand-on-cell becomes the irreducible labour; palette analysis across the four (full coloured-pencil set → compressed to coral/pink → graphite only); a four-mode taxonomy of hand-machine cooperation in the practice (pure hand; hand-interrupted plotter — Papaver Somniferum; machine-then-hand — Beads; recorded gesture — Fernand, Monaco Mix)

Reference

• Works Overview — complete chronological catalog of works and series; medium trajectory; naming patterns; exhibition history; links to harm.work throughout
• Wiki Health Report — active issues, fixed items, priority queue for wiki maintenance

Themes

• Death Imitates Language — the series (2016–): taste as fitness function; genetic algorithm + micro-feedback; biopolitics of the algorithm (Vinay Gupta / dating apps); death as selection pressure that generates language; frozen specimens as physical objects; Autobreeder; Rhizome Net Art Anthology
• Algues Artificielles — the series (2016–2022): seaweed observation → digital genome → convergent breeding; the artist's first explicit fitness function; Hybrid Vigor .bio (crowdsourced selection); Hans Arp; always-different-always-the-same; prints as frozen specimens; NFT extension (Shunned Mass)

Summaries (ingested texts)

• "The Squircle of Life," Spike #70 — interview with Tina Rivers Ryan; fitness functions across Death Imitates Language / Nested Exchange / Mutant Garden; the squircle as UI intervention; algorithmic archaeology; fossils; the limit of pure randomness
• "A 3.5 Billion Year Old Technology" — CGP interview — van den Dorpel interviews CGP inventor Julian F. Miller; CGP mechanism; non-coding genes; the halting problem; "life is a 3.5 billion year old technology"
• "Subdued Iconoclasm," ZORA ZINE (Dec 2021) — "the unconscious is manifested through that"; theology/Jung as ground for subconscious computation; subdued iconoclasm; ownership metaphysics; Event Listeners history; left gallery; Death Imitates Language on-chain plans
• Struggle for Pleasure, Verse SOLOS London (2024) — hermetic vs. gentle iterative process; pixel as dialogic unit; Pointillism; mandala; "knowledge itself breaks down"; pleasure through resistance not nostalgia
• Context Switch (Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin, 2022) — Adina Glickstein's Artforum review and Nora Enning's curatorial essay; duo exhibition with Achraf Touloub; light exposure prints (Blush Array II, Modular Mind); Mutant Garden Autobreeder on LED; Typographic Trace (plotter drawing); nested squircles as UI aesthetics; mandala/meditation as resistance to doomscroll; mark/blank as binary code; pre-Socratic "change as the only constant"; intention as dematerialised concept; digital/tangible merger; comprehension as asymptote
• Verse Twitter Spaces Interview (2024) — pixel as interpolation device; "not interested in automation"; shoegaze as structural analogy; music as highest form; net art→post-internet trajectory; Mondriaan inverted; Dieter Roth as closest affinity
• "Magicians Conceal, Artists Reveal" — ars celare artem as the classical doctrine; the modernist inversion (Impressionism → Cézanne/pentimento → Cubism → Pollock → Conceptualism → protocol art); AI as perfection of concealment at industrial scale; van den Dorpel as radicalization (concealment structurally impossible); the reveal as continuous not dramatic
• Tokenising Sustainability (2021) — personal NFT history 2015–2021; ascribe.io and immutability ≠ accessibility; left gallery's "blockchain soul"; dual-blockchain palimpsest; PoW vs. PoS written before the Merge; 2021 boom as aesthetic disappointment
• Field (2008/2023) — 2008 Flash animation ported on-chain (2023); Flash's death as the archive problem lived; on-chain as archival strategy; Actionscript→Solidity irony; spinner grid→field of flowers; "one cannot suspend being"
• Angles Morts (LOHAUS SOMINSKY, 2024) — joint exhibition with Vera Molnár; Cloud Writings series premiere; four female precursors (Albers/Molnár/Posenenske/Auerbach); gender/weaving structural argument; Albers' invisible algorithm; Molnár's valued imperfections; Embroidery's deliberate error; Cuneiform; Interpolation on millimeter paper; Kapitulation as surrender to the hand
• Cloud Writings (Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2026) — first Japan solo; algorithmic archaeology named; Anni Albers / Vera Molnár / Charlotte Posenenske as pre-computational precursors; plotter as philosophical necessity; grid = writing = weaving; heraldic imagery; Leaky Abstraction; Nethermind (Quantizer → ink); hand-drawing as meditative; digital works showing infinite possibilities alongside material instantiation
• Mandala Q&A — Goro Murayama (Cloud Writings, TSCA Tokyo, 2026) — Tibetan sand mandalas and Ryōkai Mandala as named references; Anicca as first algorithmic mandala; Quantizer trait taxonomy (tibetan, thangka); Jung's mandala-as-individuation as the destination; Markov-chain parent-conditional descent as the mechanism; "as above, so below"; the four-verb stance (provoke / structure / curate / highlight)
• Our Inner Child (Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, 2023) — biographical crisis after Stedelijk acquisition; Inner Child therapy vs. Jungian analysis; from cerebral to visceral ("the feelings that first inspired me to make images"); the religious algorithm and its limits; Endless Knot (2024) as the Buddhist counterpart of the Christian Hell of childhood — saṃsāra as recursion-without-halt; compression (Mondriaan) vs. decompression (generative art); material objects as full-resolution decompression; personal → collective inner child; Resolution Paintings series
• IOU (Narrative Projects, London, 2015) — thermopaper as ephemeral substrate; heat as mark-making; "barely touched their surface"; taxonomy of biological/mechanical small objects; "ghostly transaction" in the blockchain; earliest blockchain provenance claim; the daisy-chain text (Quake → Aaron Swartz → RSS → German receipts → thermopaper)
• Strategies (2010/2011) — collage-manifesto of rewritten aphorisms from business experts, martial arts gurus, software developers, Derrida; non-dialectical simultaneity; reverse causality; hauntology; catastrophic forgetting; authenticity as style; beauty = fitness
• Release early, release often… (Abrons Arts Center, New York, 2013) — first US solo; Karen Archey; Eric Raymond open source credo as title; recursion as curatorial premise; DeviantArt hand chain; associative installation; Andy Warhol Foundation
• Loomer (2015) — First Solo Show in Los Angeles — dropping the third-person convention; identity resistance ("I hesitate to call myself an artist"); "post internet" label as unsustainable; "what the work is about, runs ahead of myself"; the New that condenses into the Known

This is a wiki by Harm van den Dorpel Ⓗ Created with Claude