are.na channels — an index (2011–2026)

Harm van den Dorpel's channels on are.na, read through the are.na API on 1 November 2026. Of about 368 channels, 89 are public; this page covers only those. Together they hold 1,791 blocks, the oldest saved in August 2011.

On are.na a channel is a board of blocks: images, links, text and files. Van den Dorpel uses his as a working record. His own screenshots, drawings and installation photographs sit beside reference works, articles and music, and many blocks carry a caption he typed. Every block has two dates, when it was first saved and when it was filed into a channel, so the channels date the beginning of an interest more precisely than the finished works do. Several channels were created on the same day, 12 November 2017, when he sorted older material; that date marks the sorting, and the blocks inside are older.

Three channels have pages of their own: Modular Aesthetic Systems, To Exhaust a Possibility Space and Show titles. The assemblages channel is read on Sculpture.

When interests begin

The dates below come from the channels. Each links to the wiki page where the evidence, with block links and images, now sits.

• 2016. The plotter combined with the hand: Don't eat the yellow snow, captioned "2016 / semi automatic drawing (cnc + hand)" (→ Meditative Labour).
• February 2017. Genetic algorithms: a channel opens with a Death Imitates Language specimen "Born January 24th 2017" and Hybrid Vigor (→ Evolutionary Logic).
• 30 September 2017. Nested compositions: the first screenshot filenames in the Nesting channel (→ The Grid).
• 26 November 2017. Organic software forms: the channel opens with an inkblot question and a hatched horse (→ Randomness and Pattern).
• 9 December 2017. Show titles: a running list of exhibition titles (→ Show titles).
• April 2018. Arrays of identical posters on the wall, a year before the grid channel (→ The Grid); the arguments for and against blockchain, filed side by side (→ left.gallery).
• June 2018. Markov's Window shown in a version dated 2004–2018 (→ The Markov's Dream Palette); shoegaze listening, from the first block of What I'm listening to (→ Afterimage).
• August 2018. Plotter drawings coloured by hand, Untitled Nested Composition 1 and 2; the second is a lozenge (→ Meditative Labour, The Lozenge).
• November 2018. His own ERC-721 tokens: Nested Exchange and Death Imitates Language works sold as set and wildcard tokens, and the tokens.left.gallery overview (→ Protocol, Taste, and Systems, left.gallery).
• December 2018. The first statement about speed and the early computer artists, as shame (→ Does a Work Still Need to Be New?).
• January 2019. A Flash work moved to video with interpolated frames, Sleepwalker (→ Mediation and the Archive).
• February 2019. Machine-written language: a passage on GPT-2 and "low order correlations" (→ Algorithmic Archaeology); the grid channel opens.
• 26 March 2019. Cartesian genetic programming: the first output, filed under both Nesting and Modular Aesthetic Systems (→ Evolutionary Logic, The Grid).
• 2019. Decompression as a work title; in 2020 a channel applies the word to language (→ Randomness and Pattern).
• 26 March 2020. The name Mutant Garden first appears on are.na (→ Evolutionary Logic).
• August–September 2020. A registry for artworks designed on the Cosmos SDK with Dublin Core fields (→ left.gallery).
• November 2020. Code as an archaeological site, after Vinge's "Programmer-Archaeologist" (→ Algorithmic Archaeology).
• January 2021. Zen talks (→ Our Inner Child).
• May 2022. "God's greatest invention is evolution" (→ Subconscious Computation).
• August 2022. Field online as a website, a year before its tokens (→ Field).
• September 2022. Love's opposite as neglect (→ Love); charts of electron orbitals (→ Entfaltung on Paper).
• January 2023. Rotation as travel, the research for Maschine (→ Afterimage).
• September–November 2023. The lozenge hang of the Resolution Paintings, a render named mandala, and the name Venster (→ The Lozenge, Mandala Q&A).
• October 2024. A Mandala channel that opens with his nested work of 2017–2018 (→ Sacred Geometry).
• January 2025. Hanne Darboven as the source of the Interpolations (→ Algorithmic Archaeology).
• June 2025. The "Embroidery" line and the Endless Knot, dated 2025 (→ Recursion); plotter drawings coloured by hand return (→ Meditative Labour).
• July 2025. Quantizer on screen and on paper within a day (→ Quantization).
• January 2026. Stained Unravel begins beside cathedral windows (→ Stained Unravel).
• June 2026. Emma Kunz; no earlier block on Kunz in any public channel (→ The Grid).

All public channels, by year

Each line gives the date the channel was created, the number of blocks, the artist's description where there is one, and what the channel holds.

2011

• How to be successful in 5 days — 30 August; 2 blocks. His first channel.

2017

• Genetic Algorithms & Evolutionary Programming — 27 February; 13 blocks. Death Imitates Language and Hybrid Vigor, Koza's Genetic Programming, Driessens & Verstappen's Breed (1995), a note on Vinge's "Programmer-Archaeologist".
• assemblages — 27 February; 31 blocks. Sculpture references and his own assemblages (→ Sculpture).
• semiotics? — 1 March; 2 blocks. A picture that loses detail as its caption gains it; the cover of Venkatesh Rao's Tempo.
• Algues Artificielles — 12 November; 32 blocks. The series from screenshots of November 2017 to the framed prints of 2019; Sophie Taeuber-Arp's Lignes d'été (→ Algues Artificielles).
• Zoological Displays — 12 November; 7 blocks. Taxonomy charts: Pokémon, turtles, Haeckel's jellyfish, Mr. Men.
• empty UI — 12 November; 38 blocks. Screenshots of interfaces with nothing in them, and Field (→ Field).
• Nesting — 12 November; 85 blocks. Screenshots of nested compositions from 30 September 2017 to March 2019, Nested Exchange (→ The Grid).
• the brain — 12 November; 9 blocks. Anatomical images and reposts.
• organic software forms — 26 November; 54 blocks. Organic form from rules: inkblots, hatched silhouettes, Frouters, Field, "soft cells" (→ Randomness and Pattern, Meditative Labour).
• text in time — 1 December; 24 blocks. Text-over-time video, from Serra and Schoolman's Television Delivers People (1973) to his own Strategies and the token explainers of 2018.
• * not sure — 1 December; 15 blocks. Older works of his beside Richard Tuttle and Picasso's Constellation drawings; a reread of Hayles's How We Became Posthuman.
• Show titles — 9 December; 27 blocks. Candidate exhibition titles (→ Show titles).
• Parenting — 9 December; 4 blocks. Personal.

2018

• Meaning — 30 March; 2 blocks. Arakawa and Gins's The Mechanism of Meaning; a triangle of truths and lies.
• Drawings — 10 April; 32 blocks. His drawings with captions: the automatic drawings, the ballpoint plotter sheets of 2017, the hand-coloured plotter drawings of 2018 (→ Meditative Labour).
• I want to believe — 11 April; 11 blocks. left.gallery's press beside critiques of blockchain (→ left.gallery).
• Deconstruction — 12 April; 12 blocks. His GIFs, the website extinctr ("Remember what it looked like before it meant anything?"), Sleepwalker as video (→ Mediation and the Archive).
• Arrays — 22 April; 22 blocks. His risograph poster arrays of 2018 and the origin of the word (→ The Grid).
• 2005 - 2009 — 12 May; 15 blocks. Early work: GIF animations, Redux (1)–(3), Ethereal Others, a billboard (→ Works Overview).
• Augmented Reality — 22 May; 10 blocks. Gallery views and the lens-flare slide projection of 2009 (→ Surf Clubs).
• Markov — 2 June; 6 blocks. Markov's Window in its 2004–2018 version (→ The Markov's Dream Palette).
• To Exhaust a Possibility Space — 11 June; 15 blocks. "Initially I called this channel 'permutations'…" (→ source page).
• What I'm listening to — 12 June; 104 blocks. Shoegaze, Japanese ambient, minimalism, techno; Barker, Milieu, Darboven's Opus 25 A (→ Afterimage, Colour).
• Installation views — 23 August; 23 blocks. His exhibitions from Abrons (2013) to Our Inner Child (2023) (→ Release early 2013).
• Self-Referentiality — 5 September; 6 blocks. Figures from a logic text, notes 878 and 851, an xkcd strip.
• bidirectional relationships — 20 October; 3 blocks. Delinear.info beside are.na.
• Files as Objects — 29 October; 2 blocks. An essay on file formats and left.gallery's "downloadable objects".
• Token UX — 7 November; 44 blocks. "Crypto Tokens (intended for NFT)": his token site, tokens.left.gallery, blockchain interface design (→ left.gallery).
• software engineering tactics — 11 November; 4 blocks. Essays on development practice.
• Compacted Objects — 13 November; 17 blocks. "Constructions, UX Design, Pastels, Organic Thingies": his UX drawings beside Redon, Bontecou, Chaimowicz, Du Pasquier.
• Death Imitates Language Series — 19 November; 10 blocks. Works and installation views (→ Death Imitates Language).
• Regressive Webdesign — 27 November; 4 blocks. "Still looking for a better term than 'regressive' which somewhat implies a judgment."
• topologies — 19 December; 5 blocks. Network diagrams and an automatic drawing.
• contemporary generative graphics — 21 December; 12 blocks. "sometimes i feel ashamed that i'm doing very similar things like early computer artists…" (→ Does a Work Still Need to Be New?).

2019

• tactile screens — 12 January; 15 blocks. Screenshots of interfaces.
• Character Objects — 13 February; 5 blocks. Screenshots, an app icon, a British Museum object.
• Modular Aesthetic Systems — 24 February; 158 blocks. "characters, alphabets, grids, modularity, zoom" (→ source page).
• Programming Epistemology — 24 February; 17 blocks. Passages on programs, brains and language: Harel, GPT-2, "The Bitter Lesson" (→ Algorithmic Archaeology).
• Single Serving Sites — 25 February; 17 blocks. "Web sites comprised of a single page with a dedicated domain name and do only one thing" (→ Algues Artificielles).
• Captioned Images — 5 March; 4 blocks. "mostly from RSS".
• Structures of Redundancy — 28 March; 51 blocks. The first Cartesian genetic programming outputs and their exhibition (→ Evolutionary Logic).
• sculpture — 13 August; 12 blocks. Sculpture photographs, from Loomer to Notes on Objects (→ Loomer).
• Painting — 13 August; 4 blocks. Chaimowicz, Klimt, Peter Halley's "The Crisis in Geometry" (1984).

2020

• art deco — 24 January; 7 blocks. An art deco cocktail set, his construction drawing, two Cloud Writings works.
• Cartesian Genetic Programming — 12 February; 14 blocks. CGP outputs and prints, the Julian Miller interview (→ Evolutionary Logic).
• On Genetics — 26 March; 24 blocks. A brainstorm with jazmina-f; the first block named Mutant Garden; Haeckel.
• web design — 12 May; 34 blocks. Websites he made and admired.
• a theory of composability — 25 May; 1 block. "order and sequences".
• left registry — 3 August; 8 blocks. Design notes and a data model for an artwork registry (→ left.gallery).
• Metadata Standards — 11 August; 15 blocks. Dublin Core, PREMIS, schema.org, JSON-LD.
• Cosmos SDK NFT Implementation Design — 26 August; 4 blocks. "Mostly NFT related links".
• Language / Decompression — 7 September; 3 blocks. glob, "I love how this word means its opposite." (→ Randomness and Pattern).
• Curves — 28 October; 4 blocks. Taeuber-Arp, Bouroullec, Bemused Aversatility.
• Haggled Overedits — 12 November; 12 blocks. Development material for a work.
• Material Metaphor — 8 December; 4 blocks. A folded page, a sphere of metal bands, a notebook page of synonyms.
• Actor Models — 16 December; 1 block. A painting by Thomas Eggerer.

2021

• Wellness — 2 January; 26 blocks. Personal.
• hardware — 7 March; 3 blocks. Silent computers and displays.
• Braitenberg — 27 September; 1 block. "4 minute video of a Braitenberg vehicle".

2022

• Cells — 12 February; 21 blocks. Nested squircle studies for Markov's Dream; Flow Lenia (2025).
• Markov's Dream — 2 March; 24 blocks. Screenshots, the work text, candidate titles after Aphex Twin tracks.
• God — 20 May; 26 blocks. His aphorisms, Zen talks, bell hooks on love (→ Subconscious Computation, Love).
• Mutant 12652071 — 23 May; 6 blocks. Six states of the Seeder token Coralena (→ Colour).
• Colours — 27 June; 12 blocks. Court-rank colours, traditional colours of Japan, Wada Sanzo's colour combinations.
• Proto-Seeders — 24 July; 42 blocks. Thirty-six CGP outputs of April 2019.
• Probability Distribution — 2 September; 6 blocks. Charts of electron orbitals (→ Entfaltung on Paper).
• Things that make me cry — 4 September; 6 blocks. Personal; Kurtág playing Bach.
• Alternating grids (x/y) — 20 September; 11 blocks. Nested Exchange beside Poons and Posenenske (→ The Grid).
• Rastering — 6 November; 15 blocks. Halftone raster studies of October–November 2022.

2023

• Maschine — 13 January; 93 blocks. Research for the token collection Maschine (→ Afterimage).
• František Kupka — 20 February; 7 blocks. Kupka's paintings and Orphism.
• anim — 7 May; 18 blocks. "In the Dutch language 'gif' means 'poison'": his animations and their remakes (→ Field).
• Fields — 13 May; 6 blocks. Field, a radio-telescope array, a field of flowers.
• Our Inner Child — 21 July; 72 blocks. "Works and research of my solo exhibition at Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, opening 11/11/2023" (→ Our Inner Child, The Lozenge).
• High Saturation — 6 October; 26 blocks. Saturated renders, one captioned "something really annoys me in this one".
• A Sublime — 19 December; 15 blocks. "Things I found that touch on one of many possible sublimes, and my own attempts in such direction."
• emo — 19 December; 27 blocks. Older works refiled, among them Calor Scripturam (→ IOU).

2024

• Dashcam Paintings — 1 January; 24 blocks. Dashcam stills read for colour (→ Colour).
• Cropped — 22 March; 3 blocks. Two collages.
• Shrouds / Rorschach — 14 May; 4 blocks. Shroud and Symmetrical Overdub beside the Shroud of Turin (→ The Grid).
• Mandala — 18 October; 50 blocks. "or Thangka" (→ Sacred Geometry).

2025

• Interpolations — 25 January; 9 blocks. "Interpolations of works by Hanne Darboven" (→ Algorithmic Archaeology).
• Seals — 28 January; 4 blocks. Chinese seals; an editioned print of his with his own red seal.
• "Embroidery" Line Algorithm — 24 June; 8 blocks. One line algorithm over a pattern, a portrait and the endless knot (→ Recursion).
• Hand Coloured Plotter Drawings — 26 June; 4 blocks. Quadra and Alithea (→ Meditative Labour).
• Quantizer — 6 July; 22 blocks. Screenshots, an ink drawing, the tokens (→ Quantization).

2026

• Stained Unravel — 11 January; 62 blocks. Screenshots from the first morning beside cathedral windows (→ Stained Unravel).
• Emma Kunz — 10 June; 22 blocks. Kunz's drawings, Entfaltung studies, Lenore Tawney (→ Entfaltung).