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 (→ 876, 878, 992, 854, 856)

• 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)

• 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 (→ 2000, 2001); 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 (→ 2002)

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
• "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
• 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; compression (Mondrian) 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)

Syntheses & queries

(none yet)

This is a wiki by Harm van den Dorpel Ⓗ