Judgment and Calculation — Exhibition Text

Group exhibition by Elisabeth Sonneck, Carsten Becker and Harm van den Dorpel.
Opening: 11.07.2026 · Venue: HAUNT (Berlin) · Curatorial text: Qin Yan (curator) · Status: first draft (June 2026), circulated to the artists for feedback

Original German source: Ausstellungstext_Judgment and Calculation.pdf. The translation below is the working English version; the wiki's review of the text lives at the Judgment and Calculation review page.

They were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being "rational"… [They] did not judge; they calculated… an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality [became] the leitmotif of the decision making. ¹

In Computer Power and Human Reason, Joseph Weizenbaum invokes Hannah Arendt's critique of American decision-makers — in particular the Pentagon's political strategists during the Vietnam War: they did not judge, they calculated. Already fifty years ago Joseph Weizenbaum perceived that modern technological society was moving increasingly toward understanding the world as a calculable system. From data analysis to algorithmic decision-making, from standardized administration to artificial intelligence, ever more human actions are translated into information, parameters and models. In this process, judgment is replaced by calculation, experience by data, responsibility by programs, meaning by efficiency. For Weizenbaum the most profound misunderstanding of the age of artificial intelligence lies not in overestimating the capabilities of machines, but in unnoticeably substituting the question of the processing of information for the question of the essence of the human. ²

The group exhibition Judgment and Calculation, presented jointly by Elisabeth Sonneck, Carsten Becker and Harm van den Dorpel, unfolds this question further: if the world increasingly tends to understand itself through calculation, do we still possess the capacity for judgment — or are we gradually installing "calculability" as the ultimate measure for understanding human and world? In the exhibition the three artists each engage the colour system in their own way and take up this question from the perspective of their respective practices.

Elisabeth Sonneck

The work of Elisabeth Sonneck begins with colour, which appears as a cosmos of infinite differences and relations not fully graspable in language. Sonneck understands colour not as a static state but as an active energy that, in its encounter with other colours, materials, light, spaces and time, continually brings forth new connections. Without a predetermined pictorial schema, the layered application of semi-transparent washes produces chromatic processes marked by subtle colour shifts, irreversible traces of overlay, and chance visual relations. Taking painting on paper as a potential point of departure, Sonneck develops her site-specific installations. The papers are carried over into continuously changing, temporary and unfixed spatial structures, transforming the relativity of colour into the relativity of form. For Sonneck "judgment" in painting is understood as an empirical, momentary and processual act of decision arising from bodily movement, reach and perception. In her installation practice this judgment is surrendered to the material, its properties, and the space. "Calculation" appears in her painting not as an instrument of control but as a deliberate reduction of means, in order to give space to the diversity and unpredictability of colour. In the installations it shows itself as a process-oriented engagement with material and space that is not goal-directed but remains open-ended and in flux.

Carsten Becker

In his engagement with the historical standardization of colour and objects, Carsten Becker shows how "calculability" arises as an effect of normative orders. In his DIN series (developed since 2019) and his most recent series TGL, the artist reconstructs industrial colour systems such as RAL as well as the now-vanished colour standards of the GDR (TGL). He shows how colours are coded, classified and administered by state, industrial and technical systems. Colour is thereby no longer understood as a phenomenal perceptual field, but transferred into a system of repeatable, comparable, technically processable parameters. This logic of standardization continues in his investigation of twentieth-century industrial products. The objects appearing in his works — e.g. standard parts, M-56 helmets, air-raid-protection elements, plunger switches and bottles — were originally embedded in functional production systems and determined by unambiguous numberings and norms. Standardization thus not only defines the objects but at the same time forms the structural precondition for a calculation-based logic of resource management and control, particularly in the military-industrial systems of the Second World War. Through repainting, reproductions, photographic placements and juxtapositions, Becker releases these objects from their original functional context and lays bare their historical layering and their embedding in institutional power structures. This process is not a reconstruction of standards but a renewed opening of the visible to judgment: to contemplation, interpretation and re-evaluation. Colour becomes the carrier of ideological shifts, the industrial product becomes the material imprint of power structure, and the norm appears as the trace of the covert continuities between different political regimes.

Harm van den Dorpel

Harm van den Dorpel's practice is based on algorithmic systems in which — by means of procedures such as random numbers, genetic algorithms or blockchain-based programs — visual objects arise that continually reproduce, vary and evolve. Colours are defined here as "colour chords," that is, as predefined combinations of several colours (e.g. RGB, HSLA, CMYK) that serve the system as initial conditions. For van den Dorpel the single colour is meaningless; meaning arises exclusively in the relations between colours. This experience occurs primarily on a bodily and non-linguistic level, similar to the mémoire involontaire described by Proust, in which sensory impressions trigger memories prior to any linguistic articulation. However, the resulting images, for the artist, are not the product of algorithmic search but the result of aesthetic decisions. Since Death Imitates Language, van den Dorpel has investigated the question of what, within a system of infinite variations, decides which images are preserved and which are discarded. Here the artist assumes the role of the selector. In the later series Algues Artificielles this decision is transferred to the public. This reveals a central connection: algorithms generate possibilities, but meaning arises only through human judgment. Calculation can generate countless images, yet is unable to explain why different visual objects containing the same colour combinations evoke, in different individuals, memories of childhood, love, grief or death.

Works in the exhibition

The works van den Dorpel shows at HAUNT, drawn from the exhibition checklist.

Alongside Creation of Light, the show includes A Vale of Tears (2024) and Lacelove (2023) — illustrated on the review page — together with Rite (2023), Nacre (2023), Pivot (2023), Vortex (2024), Person in a Field (2024), Altibzz (2023), the timestamp-titled prints Thursday, March 28 2019, 16:10:34 and Friday, April 26 2019, 00:50:27 (2023), and Big Pablo Ferenc Zatlas (2021) — the last a Death Imitates Language frozen specimen whose three-word title encodes its genealogical lineage.

¹ Arendt, Hannah: Crises of the Republic, New York 1972, p. 11 f.
² Weizenbaum, Joseph: Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, New York / San Francisco 1976, p. 202 ff.