Dissociations

An LLM-maintained wiki layer on top of Harm van den Dorpel's archive, begun in 2010 as dissociations.com — a second brain for the practice and a public reading room. The numbered notes in sources/ are the raw stratum, many of them passages collected from other writers; the pages below synthesize, cross-reference, and connect.

Start here

• The Practice in Propositions — the artist statement in Tractatus form; seven propositions distilling the practice as a truth-finding procedure
• About — what this site is; 2010 origin; New Museum First Look; 2026 LLM mutation
• The Generative Threshold — hub for three lines across the practice; less composed than initiated; taste made explicit, read as a loop in which the criterion stays with the artist; compression and decompression; the loom genealogy

Frames of thinking

Conceptual scaffolds the practice runs on.

• Does a Work Still Need to Be New? — thesis in five questions: works made after older works with a machine made of older texts, read against Mark Fisher's hauntology; Krauss's modernist new as repressed repetition; generativity before the computer (Kunz's pendulum, divination); oracles and the direction of their bias; the new as unfolding, computed from the present
• Recursion and Self-Reference — 876 On recursion: self-reference, the stop condition, radical autonomy; the forms recursion takes in the archive and the works
• The Semiotic Square — 901 New and Different and its negations, read as Greimas's square; the new as experience, not as position; ZORA's "subdued iconoclasm"
• Assemblage Identity — DeLanda; everything vs. anything; Agamben's profane order; interval space
• Sculpture and the Object — the Assemblages (2011–18), open spheres of hand-cut, UV-printed, riveted strips that began as Cinema 4D renders; Travis Jeppesen's Revenge of the Spheres
• The Four Master Tropes — 2011 video of reordered Kindle highlights, DeviantArt images and studio photos; the title is Kenneth Burke's essay
• Randomness and Pattern — Hayles's information as pattern (805); Arp's chance collage; the limits of pure randomness; organic and geometric as one continuum
• Mediation and the Archive — Derrida's Archive Fever (822) and Hayles's flickering signifiers; The Work = The Work + Its Documentation (992) as recursive inclusion; the score kept, the performance let go
• Impulse, Risk, Method — discovery rather than decision, from Bernard Williams via 793; Pye's workmanship of risk; constrained chance
• Love — What Love Is Not — Krishnamurti's via negativa applied to love, read as the negative selection that produced Dissociations; Bataille via Čeika; Williams on the deepest impulse (793); Haddaway as the negative case
• Apophatic Theology — the via negativa as the wiki's reading of the practice, from the artist's "a bit like apophatic theology" (2026); Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Eckhart, the Cloud of Unknowing; the evangelical upbringing; legislative (cataphatic) vs. generative (apophatic); the Dionysian double movement
• Différance — Derrida's differ/defer read onto the dissociative mechanism; "Identity is deferred" (note 952); Saussure's diacritical sign; Strategies' rewritten advice; Hyphenation .xyz (2019); the reserve left undecided

Form and geometry

Recurring shapes, surfaces, and structural devices.

• The Grid — Rosalind Krauss's "Grids" (1979) against the practice's grid algorithms (CGP, Field, Anni, Pression des pairs, Stained Unravel); the loom as the grid's other ancestry; the grid that develops; the screen as its edge; the interface grid; Rasterbild and Rasterbild II after Posenenske
• The Lozenge — Mondrian's lozenge canvases from 1918 and Krauss's centrifugal grid; Markov's Window (2004) and its turned monitor; Untitled Nested Composition 2 (2018); the Resolution Paintings hung on their points (2023); Venster (2024); Endless Knot (2025)
• The Squircle — the superellipse between circle and square; the rounded interface corner as ideology in the Markov's Dream text (2022) and the Spike interview; a form presented as natural against a form derived by visible rules
• Sacred Geometry — Emma Kunz's pendulum drawings as the artist's own use of the term; loom, mandala, stained glass, heraldry; Anicca (2025); meaning initiated, not assigned
• Quantization and Dithering — error diffusion by eleven methods in Quantizer (2025); CGA, Apple II, ZX Spectrum and other hardware palettes; the block as the unit of time
• Colour — meaning in combinations, not single colours; five ways of making them: RGB extremes (the Markov's Dream palette), hand-made palettes (Stained Unravel), old-computer and named palettes (Quantizer), and more; written for Judgment and Calculation (HAUNT, 2026); judgment relocated
• Afterimage — the trace after the stimulus; Markov's Dream #10 Rotorelief after Duchamp; Maschine (2023); Relieved Afterimage in Struggle for Pleasure; tinnitus and shoegaze

Process and method

How the work is made.

• Process Legibility — the construction of an image stays readable in the image; checked against Stained Unravel, Struggle for Pleasure and the plotter drawings; concealment as a relation between image and rule
• Algorithmic Archaeology — the artist's name for reconstructing rule-based procedures of earlier artists, first recorded in Spike #70; a timeline from the loom and the mandala through the Markov chain, Albers, Kunz, the cellular automaton, Posenenske and Molnár to the language model
• Evolutionary Logic — Cartesian Genetic Programming; fitness functions; algorithmic archaeology
• Subconscious Computation — Joseph del Pesco's phrase; Dissociations (2010) computing associations from what he threw out; creator and bystander; the deciding mind leaves generation and stays in selection
• Protocol, Taste, and Systems — Brian Droitcour's Beautiful Rules (2025): protocol art and taste, personal, collective, then systemic; Dissociations, Delinear.info, Mutant Garden Seeder, Quantizer; the "blockchain soul"
• Meditative Labour — four ways hand and plotter work together; Kapitulation (2024) and Beads I–III (2025); Monaco Mix and Fernand; the hand inside the loop
• Release Early, Release Often — Eric Raymond's description of Torvalds's method as the title of the 2013 Abrons show; openness as stance; recursion through the outside
• Limit Experience — Bataille; Agamben; Chemsex Benelux (2022)

Bodies of work

Named series and projects.

• Death Imitates Language — the first series bred with a genetic algorithm (2016–); likes, visitor statistics and simulated ageing as selection; Autobreeder
• Algues Artificielles — seaweed curves bred by sibling crossover from summer 2016; Hans Arp; Hybrid Vigor .bio (2017), where visitors choose
• Senescenence (2026) — Interface Gallery with Nguyen Wahed, New York, 3 April – 2 May 2026; seven Stained Unravel tokens and four drawings; "less composed than initiated"
• Stained Unravel — 23-state morphological vocabulary; positional compare, temporal staining, edge merging; seven palettes on one logic; death as one shape among 23; Blockade, the Museum Proof after Franke, with its own rule pool and timing
• Interruptions (2026) — five on-chain tokens after Vera Molnár; the rotating line of Pression des pairs (2024) run on the Stained Unravel engine; nine cell states, including spinning, stuck and neighbour-following lines; neighbour averaging as a diffusion equation; ornament and flow; Peer Pressure, Interruptions, Monochrome, Projection, Nocturne and their palettes, among them a near-copy of the IBM PC 16-colour set
• Quantizer (2025) — 256 tokens on Ethereum; new composition every 12 seconds from block hashes; hardware-palette catalogue with swatches; eleven error-diffusion methods; plotter drawings
• Entfaltung (2026) — the series after Emma Kunz's pendulum drawings; her sitting from the eyewitness accounts; four stages from emulation to points moving in space and time; the editor; Manfred Mohr; nesting and the grid; the pendulum taken apart
• Entfaltung on Chain (2026) — the 36 tokens: Genesis, 24 by the artist, 8 for collectors, 3 artist's proofs; one renderer on-chain, updatable by design; every point joined to every other; symmetry groups from mirror to icosahedral; the 48-second cycle of three turns and a morph; faces rebuilt at each move; the relay and the shared clock; twin tokens ⧗ and ꕥ; traits; glyphs and folds; every token's palette
• Predecessors of Entfaltung — Quantizer's block-hash engine and its memoryless images; Anicca's mandala; Manfred Mohr's rigid hypercubes
• Entfaltung on Paper (2026) — the 19 drawings by title, date and construction (Seraph, Emanation, Meridian I–IV, Tabula I–II, Commissure, Nimbus, Mask, Cardinal, Syzygy); plotter construction, hand colouring; tokens and drawings split Emma Kunz's method; her sitting from the eyewitness accounts; the sequence June–October 2026; criterion at the speed of the hand; how Kunz channelled; authorship in an open tradition
• Early Plotter Drawings — the artist's note for Lohaus Gallery's Summer: Sur Real Real (2026): botanical and geometric plotter drawings of 2017–18 (Thistle, Papaver Somniferum, Metaballs ⁱⁱ, Diaphragm) and Diagonal Fault and Vesper (2026); the organic–geometric continuum
• Codec Breeze — four 2008 videos (Trees, Plastic Plant, Smoke, Baptism) in which only the parts of a photograph that might be alive run through a low-quality codec; chance given a spiritual reading; Baptism with only the water encoded; the 2009 conversation with his parents, his father then an evangelical preacher; a piece shown at Club Internet the same summer
• Zeuchnungen — 2012 digital collages made for dissociations.com; scanned paintings and drawings reworked in Photoshop; overlay, subtraction and composite operations; smoke plume, white voids, 3D clip-art, glitch blocks; originals lost; Versum 2022 and own Tezos contract 2024; Zeuchnung #4, Thread, Boarish
• Markov's Dream Palette — four colours picked by hand in 2004 (blue, green, magenta, a grey gradient) returning in six works through 2026; Venster adds red and orange
• Lexachast (2016–) — with Amnesia Scanner and Bill Kouligas (PAN): the website lexachast.com (January 2016), live sets in 2016–17 curated in real time, the LP on PAN (2019); open_NSFW and word2vec over the internet image-pool; "Ken Burns effect on steroids"
• qubibi's hello world — Kazumasa Teshigawara's hello world (2010) read beside dissociations.com, after Giannis Sourdis's essay (2026): two running systems begun the same year, forms grown from simple rules

Networks and platforms

The spaces the practice was made in and built.

• Surf Clubs (2003–) — group blogs where artists posted what they found; Nasty Nets coining the term in 2006 and its 39-member roster; Supercentral and Charles Broskoski's route to Are.na; Spirit Surfers and the boon/wake split; del.icio.us as the network where the community actually formed; the Internet Sleepover at Eyebeam, 2007; work as common property before NFTs; the crossing into physical space in 2009
• Club Internet (2008–2010) — van den Dorpel's online exhibition space at clubinternet.org; the domain speculation that became a Freemason-modelled society and then a gallery; 15 shows, ~274 works, 106 artists reconstructed from the recovered MySQL tables; guest curators Damon Zucconi, Constant Dullaart, Guthrie Lonergan, Martijn Hendriks, Domenico Quaranta and Charles Broskoski; one work at a time in a fake browser chrome; Free Fall at Mediamatic and AFK sculpture park in Kreuzberg as the move offline, curated by AIDS-3D, photographed and also scanned as 3D point clouds
• left gallery (2015–2022) — downloadable objects sold in editions of a hundred; founded with Paloma Rodríguez Carrington after the MAK Vienna bought Event Listeners with Bitcoin in April 2015; ascribe.io certificates independent of the gallery; routing around the app stores; the 2020 loss of the "blockchain soul"; closed March 2022; circulation, not stages

Reference

• Works Overview — dated catalogue of works and exhibitions 2004–2026, with pointers to the pages on each
• External Writings — every ingested text by someone other than the artist: author, venue, year and the wiki page that reads it
• For collectors: How to receive your NFT — wallet, recovery phrase, public address; How to display your NFT — browser, dedicated screen or projection
• are.na channels (2011–2026) — index of the 89 public research channels; when each interest began, with the wiki page that records it; show titles, the running list of candidate exhibition titles
• Wiki Health Report — open issues; maintenance principles

Conversations and writings

Ingested external texts: interviews, reviews, catalog essays.

• CGP — Julian F. Miller interview (2021) — life is a 3.5 billion year old technology; CGP's origin in circuit design (1997); non-coding genes; technology, not life
• Outland — Sutela conversation (2021) — pixel-sorters; DNA as recursive zip; library-as-agar
• ZORA ZINE — Subdued Iconoclasm (2021) — theology and the unconscious; Event Listeners history
• Tokenising Sustainability (2021) — personal NFT history 2015–21; ascribe.io; PoW vs. PoS
• Spike #70 — The Squircle of Life (2021/22) — conversation with Tina Rivers Ryan; four selection criteria; the squircle; the MAK purchase as Ryan tells it
• Artforum — Context Switch (2022) — Adina Glickstein's review; mandala vs. doomscroll
• Verse Twitter Spaces (2024) — with Nico Epstein and Leyla Fakhr; pixels and varying resolution; every stage kept and timestamped; Dieter Roth as closest affinity
• Verse SOLOS London — Struggle for Pleasure (2024) — four Swallow, Only Shallow wall objects and 128 quadtree tokens; William Kherbek's first-person press release; pleasure through resistance
• Magicians Conceal, Artists Reveal — a text in the archive on ars celare artem inverted; concealment as a relation between image and rule, not a property of the tool
• TSCA Tokyo — Cloud Writings (2026) — first solo show at Takuro Someya Contemporary Art; 22 works; why a plotter
• Mandala Q&A — Goro Murayama (2026) — Tibetan sand mandala; Jung; Anicca
• Judgment and Calculation — reading the text (2026) — Qin Yan's text for the show with Sonneck and Becker at frontviews at HAUNT; colour chords; the artist as selector; the published text took up the three corrections; judgment relocated
• Venster — the writing (2024) — first-person artist's text accompanying the Venster NFT collection; pixel-perfect as inherited demand; cross-browser SVG variation; the score / performance distinction for on-chain art; April 2026 dedicated site at venster.harm.work
• Franke × van den Dorpel — Vectors, Apple Munich (2026) — Margit Rosen's curatorial text; Stained Unravel (Blockade), the eighth token, with Franke's Move (Blockade) (1991–94); beauty vs. aging; CRT palette and square grids
• Upstream — Our Inner Child (2023) — Inner Child therapy; the Resolution Paintings made with the Markov's Window algorithm; compression vs. decompression
• Angles Morts — with Vera Molnár (2024) — two-person show in Munich; four women whose grid work he has researched since 2019; weaving; the Cloud Writings premiere
• Narrative Projects — IOU (2015) — ten works on thermosensitive paper; heat as mark; provenance "timestamped in the supposedly perpetual blockchain"
• Loomer — LA (2015) — first LA solo, at Young Projects; the first-person press release; post-internet accepted but "not sustainable"
• Just-in-Time — American Medium (2015) — Jaakko Pallasvuo's Facebook-chat press release; Delinear Whiteboards (scrum kanban) series; "process happens before the work" as the 2015 formulation that process-legibility later resolves; Arendt on understanding-not-influence; Agamben on absolute potentiality; Wilk on invisibility
• Abrons Arts Center — Release Early (2013) — first US solo; Karen Archey
• Strategies (2010/2011) — collage-manifesto; non-dialectical simultaneity; hauntology
• Field (2008/2023) — Flash animation ported on-chain; Actionscript → Solidity

This is a wiki by Harm van den Dorpel Ⓗ co-authored with an LLM