Modular Aesthetic Systems — are.na channel (2019–)

Harm van den Dorpel's channel Modular Aesthetic Systems on are.na, read through the are.na API on 1 November 2026. Channel description: "characters, alphabets, grids, modularity, zoom". Created 24 February 2019; 157 blocks. The artist (November 2026): he began the grid work and the research into grid systems and modularity in this channel about seven years earlier.

Most blocks are images without captions: screenshots of work in progress, and reference images. The list below gives the named blocks in the order they were added. The wiki's reading is on The Grid.

2019

• 24 February. The channel opens with woodcuts by Gert and Uwe Tobias, a sub-channel Automata, and an image from van den Dorpel's Pattern and Presence archive.
• 1–4 March. Screenshots of work in progress; paintings by David Novros and Peter Halley (The Turning, 2008).
• 27–28 March. Two blocks titled Colour Configuration Pair, one captioned "Cartesian genetic programming", followed by four screenshots. These are the first works of his own in the channel, the beginning of Colour Configurations (2019–2022).

2020–2023

Single additions: a 1979 Herman Miller sales packet designed by Barbara Loveland, photographs by Patrick Winfield and Bastien Pourtout, and a press image from the Charlotte Posenenske retrospective Work in Progress (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen).

2024

The channel is busiest in the spring of 2024, the months in which the Anni and Pression des pairs software was written.

• Weaving and textile. Anni Albers (Second Movement I–VI, 1978, and other works); the Bauhaus weaver Benita Koch-Otte (Projet pour un tapis, 1922, and a carpet design); Tauba Auerbach's Shadow Weave paintings and an Art21 segment on her; Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, The Weaver and the Spoke; the exhibition Hard/Soft. Textiles and Ceramics in Contemporary Art (MAK, Vienna); a video of weaving on a "Live Loom"; a sub-channel Weaving Coding.
• Writing. Sumerian cuneiform on clay (5 March).
• Rule-based and modular art. Vera Molnár; Charlotte Posenenske, Ohne Titel (Rasterbild), 1957, and Rasterbild Kat. CP17, 1956–57, plaka on paper, 31 × 44 cm; François Morellet; Hanne Darboven, Konstruktion / Perforation New York, 1966/67, pencil and ballpoint; a grid by Sol LeWitt; Larry Poons; Dan Walsh; Xylor Jane; Matt Hoyt; Evan Holloway; Ernest Edmonds (a work of 1985).
• The computer as board. Christopher Strachey's draughts program (1952), shown as a board on a screen (12 April).
• His own work. Four tokens of Struggle for Pleasure; Bamboo and Bamboo (II); the Anni Editor (20 March); Pression des pairs (10 April); Cloud, Seagulls, Rain (13 April); Weaving (square) and the Cloud Writings series (23 April); the plotter drawings Valley ("Probabilities transition gradually based on the coordinates within the canvas (x/y)"), Shroud ("Mirrored overdrawn, creating a mild symmetry"), Mold ("Rotated overdrawn"), Pineal and Fait Divers; the exhibition Angles Morts (Lohaus Sominsky, Munich). Sub-channels Nesting, Proto-Seeders and contemporary generative graphics.

2025–2026

Tauba Auerbach, Ligature Drawing, 24 March 2024; ten screenshots of work in progress dated April 2024 to April 2025; the record sleeve of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians; a sub-channel Stained Unravel (23 February 2026).

Notes

Several entries also appear in Rosalind Krauss's essay "Grids" (1979): Sol LeWitt, Larry Poons and the grid as a model of repetition, which Reich's music shares (→ sources/ingested/krauss-grids-1979.md). The channel's own interface is a grid: are.na shows a channel as rows of equal tiles.