Show titles — are.na channel (2017–)
Harm van den Dorpel's channel Show titles on are.na, read through the are.na API on 1 November 2026. Created 9 December 2017; 27 blocks, the latest of 7 August 2026. No channel description.
The channel is a list of possible exhibition titles. Apart from one link and one attachment, every block is a short text block that van den Dorpel typed himself. The titles are listed below in the order they were added, each linked to its block. Where a title borrows an existing term, the term is linked.
The titles
9–13 December 2017
- Category mistake — the philosophical term (category mistake).
- Asking for a friend — became Asking for a Friend, Narrative Projects, London, 2017.
- Pattern and Presence — became Pattern & Presence, Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam, 2018. Four days later he added the project page from his website, whose text opens: "We can understand the complexity of the outer world only because our codes for constructing the inner world are similarly diverse".
- Note to self
- Link in bio
December 2020
- A Field Without Boundaries (4 December), with his note: "Bounds are the entire area that belongs to something, while a boundary is the outside edge that defines it." Three days later he added the source of the phrase as a Word file: Candia Morgan's plenary paper "Language and Mathematics: A Field Without Boundaries" (CERME 8, 2013), which maps the study of language in mathematics education. The phrase closes the text of Field (2008, released on-chain in 2023): "We find ourselves in a large open field: a field without boundaries" (→ Field).
- Numerical Turmeric (15 December)
October–November 2023
- Anagnorisis (6 October) — the moment of recognition in Greek tragedy (anagnorisis).
- Our Inner Child (6 October) — became Our Inner Child, Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam, opening 11 November 2023 (→ Our Inner Child).
- Selected Ambient Works (8 October) — after Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85–92 (1992).
- Upward Inflections (6 November)
- Fabricated Memories / Confabulations (19 November) — confabulation is the recall of memories that were never formed.
- Perfromance (22 November), spelled so.
2025
- A broken clock is right twice a day (13 February)
- Unverified Personal Gnosis (23 May) — a term from contemporary paganism for belief gained through personal spiritual experience (unverified personal gnosis).
- Pious Fraud (7 June) — a deception committed for a religious end (pious fraud).
- The Fascinator (6 September)
2026
- Hapax Legomenon (28 April) — a word that occurs only once in a text or corpus (hapax legomenon).
- Clamtears and Elfbread (13 May)
- Verisimilitude (17 May) — the appearance of being true (verisimilitude).
- τὸ ἄγραφον δόγμα (the unwritten doctrine) (27 May) — Plato's unwritten doctrines, the teachings ascribed to Plato that he did not write down.
- A lighter-touch de-duplication (1 June)
- The Memory of a Free Festival (7 June) — after David Bowie's song Memory of a Free Festival (1969).
- Nocturnal Emissions (27 July)
- Sex, or Jazz, or Soup (Genitals and Manuscripts) (7 August)
Notes
The list runs in bursts: five titles in December 2017, two in December 2020, six in autumn 2023 while Our Inner Child was being prepared, and nine between April and August 2026. The 2025–2026 titles lean on religion and on the limits of knowledge (unverified gnosis, pious fraud, an unwritten doctrine, a word that occurs once), the territory of Apophatic Theology and Différance.