Early series texts on harm.work

Source: the series and work pages on harm.work linked under each heading, read through the public API on 7 November 2026. The texts are first person, by the artist, undated; internal references place them around 2021–2022. They are copied as published, typos included. The text of the Pixel Sorters series is in the Folia announcement and read on Pixel Sorters. The wiki reads them on Revenant Series, Animal Configurations, Ethereal Self & Others and Early Works (2007–2011).

Revenant Series (2006)

Source: Revenant Series

Teaser: Series of animated found images of collapsed peoples.

The works in this series have an uncanny quality for me on multiple levels. In the first sense, the images themselves touch on the strange ways our minds work when we see the human body. The source images for these works were all found photographs. The images are all of people who are seen sleeping (or, quite likely, passed out). In composing some of them, I simply animated the prone bodies and then filled in the space where they were lying with some crude Photoshop work. In seeing the works, I was stunned at the way that once the body parts were animated and had assembled themselves, the images gave the sensation of seeing an actual body move. It certainly brought me into an awareness of my own body and the materiality of it, but also, in a curious and estranged way, a sense of the body itself as animate while simultaneously being an object, capable of independent mobility, but also capable of merging - categorically - with objects like furniture.

These images are also uncanny for me in that while they are both animate and inanimate - ‘moving still’ is the term I use for them - they are also lodged in an unresolved space between video works and photographs. I originally made the works using Adobe Flash. They were intended to be seen on websites, and, therefore, become a moving image on an page of otherwise still images. That sense of the unexpected was crucial, for me to their meaning. Now that websites are no longer such a central part of the way people interact with the internet, these works have lost a significant aspect of their context, but that alienation, I think, lends them another kind of significance.

When I made these images, most of the people who were discussing my work came from the world of photography, but now, when they are shown, people see them as ‘video art’. I definitely never conceived of them in terms of being video art, as the expectations around video and movement are very different. For my own part, I see them as a form of collage from the Net Art age, using the found images, cutting, and recombining of traditional collage, but without gluing and with a dynamic rather than static composition.

The titles are somewhat ironic, but they also have a personal dimension. My father is a theologian in the Netherlands, and the Christian connotations of ‘resurrection’ are a part of the range of references the works encompass. Perhaps that is an aspect of why they are so uncanny to me, the ways in which they gesture toward things I can apprehend but not fully comprehend.

Animal Configurations (2007)

Source: Animal Configurations

Teaser: Series of found images of animals reconfigured with Photoshop or self-programmed software.

These are some of my earliest works to receive a (somewhat) wide audience. The works date from 2007. This was a time when artists were first getting excited about the ready availability of images they could access just by doing Google searches. The images were high quality, and often rather clinical. In their apparent simplicity, they were easy to manipulate, like sampling a song where the first bar is just drums. The stills are the first part in a series of images including black and white animated GIFs and other animations.

Using animals as the subjects for the images also lent itself to the overall generic quality. The images were more indexical in nature rather than being portraits in the way they would be if they were of humans, or, for example, of specific pets posed for the shot. They were just of “animals”.

The works resurfaced in my consciousness recently when they started appearing in posts on Instagram - uncredited, I might add. The goat, in particular, proved to be very popular. People thought the images were very funny and they liked them, but when they found out the effects were created in software, they were disappointed. They thought I’d done them photographically with exposure effects, but, in fact, it was all a function of settings and filters. In that the images could be thought of as “pure products” of the internet - the result of simple googling and downloading Photoshop illegally - this genericness of their creation appeals to me and fits with the overall tenor of the project as I understood it.

Ethereal Self & Others (2008)

Source: Ethereal Self & Others

Teaser: Two connected websites, capturing and displaying people with their own webcam (after consent).

I made Ethereal Self at a time when my peers and I were making works that consisted of a single artwork with a single domain name. At the time these were known as ‘single serving sites’. Miltos Manetas, I think, was the first to recognise that this was a valid medium, the domain name. During this time, I became very interested in the people who were visiting the sites.

Ethereal Self was a direct response to that interest. In a gallery context, you can see the people who come to see your work; however, on the web - at least in 2008 when this work was made - your visitors are essentially invisible. These were the first days of attempting to stream images over the web, and in terms of the work, I wondered whether it would even be possible to send the user's webcam photos to my webserver to store. It was a rather complex process at that time, encoding the image in the browser, sending them to a server for decode, and then recording the image, but it was possible to do. The work became, for me, a way of returning the gaze of the internet. The idea that a work existed on the web but as the artist, you really had only a very vague idea who anyone seeing your work might be prompted me to try to find out. These people were watching me without my knowing, and it turned out, over the course of creation of Ethereal Self and Ethereal Others, I was watching them without their knowing too.

In Ethereal Others, the people who visited the site were listed in a grid, and sometimes when visitors had forgotten to turn their cameras off, I would end up with hours of footage, some of it very private, that I didn’t know what to do about. Ultimately I created a script that would filter out all the movement by people in the images so the work could be shown in galleries and museums. Given that this was pre-Edward Snowden, pre-Cambridge Analytica, etc., people read it as a kind of activist work, warning about the dangers to privacy posed by the web, connecting your living room to the entire world potentially. Now, of course, everyone knows about it, and so that reading is less significant, but I find there to be a poetic quality to the empty interiors it depicts, and it reflects a kind of melancholy I felt at the time, wondering who all these people were, what they were making of my work. What did it all mean? Was there any value in any of it? I think there is, but a lot of that meaning is personal.

Reflecting on the darker and more corporate turn the internet has taken in recent years, I’ve decided that what might have been a valid artistic position thirteen years ago has taken a different meaning now, and so I’ve deactivated the work at the present.

Diagonal Enlargements (2009)

Source: Diagonal Enlargements

Teaser: Low resolution found images enlarged by a custom diagonal enlargement algorithm.

I wondered, when enlarging low resolution bitmap images, if it were possible to come up with an alternative to square rectangular pixels. Why not extrapolate the connections between enlarged pixels diagonally? This resulted in new textures, while remaining perhaps more truthful to the original structure and composition.

These images were calculated in 2009 and minted in 2022.

Work texts

Rug (2009): A found low resolution image (60×96 pixels) of a rug, enlarged factor 6 with my self-invented diagonal enlarger algorithm, then enlarged 4 times with a regular nearest neighbour enlarger.

Panda (2009): A found GIF image (50×50 pixels) of a panda, enlarged factor 100 (5000×5000 pixels) with a self-invented diagonal enlarger algorithm.

Pizza (2009): A found GIF image (50×50 pixels) of a pizza, enlarged factor 100 (5000×5000 pixels) with a self-invented diagonal enlarger algorithm.

Work texts of single early works

Pseudo Psycho

Source: Pseudo Psycho

When Adobe decided to kill its Flash Player in 2020, instantly a rich heritage of early interactive animations and net art disappeared from our web browsers (and our collective memory).

Among those this interactive animation which I made while still in art school around 2004. I believe I called it "Pseudo Psycho" at the time, in response to obligatory ceramics classes.

It's ironic how much smoother and perfect these animations rendered back then as computed vector graphics, compared to the ugly lossy & glitchy encoded video offered by Instagram now in 2022.

White Rectangle

Source: White Rectangle

2024 remake of the 2008 Flash animation using HTML + CSS.

[a]{104}

Source: [a]{104}

Found images of a yellow helicopter and a room with cacti, and 104 times the "a" in Times New Roman (italic), superimposed using blending modes. The title is a regular expression which would exactly match the repeating characters in the image.

I once printed this collage and poured synthetic toxic resin over it, but I destroyed that work.

Exotica

Source: Exotica (download link omitted)

Remastered to 4K in 2025, duration 8 minutes. Edition 3+1AP. To be installed alongside a noise generator playing soft pink noise.

[The page then quotes six lines of the Talking Heads song "Heaven" (1979), from "Everyone is trying to get to the bar" to the refrain "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens", sung twice. The lyrics are not reproduced here.]