Associative Systems — Nora Khan

Nora Khan, "Associative Systems: On Harm van den Dorpel, for E-State Realisms, ArtCenter South Florida", in the exhibition catalogue (e-publication), pp. 26–33, September 2018. Catalogue PDF. The essay is about 3,000 words; this file summarises it in order and quotes the passages used on the wiki. Wiki reading: E-State Realisms (ArtCenter/South Florida, 2018). The exhibition text and Emer Grant's essay are in E-State Realisms — exhibition text and catalogue.

Summary with quotations

Not "digital art". Khan begins by doubting the category: "'digital art' is a catch-all, and it might be the wrong phrase for Harm's work, and further one he'd likely avoid. Let's say, the generative software field." Her first response to the work is "I've never seen anything like this before".

Frozen artifacts. On the prints:

The uncanny, eerie paintings of Death Imitates Language and Nested Exchange look out of time and out of this world. They are frozen artifacts pulled from a living, generative process. They feel like the work of an alien that came down and only studied abstract art.

Each generation's winners are "selected by the artist for their most aesthetically interesting, or unique, or meaningful qualities", and the process "begins to generate its own strange aesthetic. The 'algorithm itself is the aesthetic process. The ideology is in there, in the code,' as Harm told me in 2016."

Against romantic authorship. She says the practice "avoids espousing any one ideological stance" and that "His interventions use programming to challenge semi-sacred, romantic concepts in art, like divine inspiration or solitary creative genius." His programs model "very unscientific and yet socially and culturally vital processes": "we gossip, we absorb unclear information we have no proof for, we tell half-truths, we lie, we speculate, we infer, we suggest." She quotes him (from a 2015 Metropolis M interview, via Google Translate) on how "dysfunctionality, complexity and unpredictability were often interpreted as problems that had to be solved" in programming, which he wanted instead to "call them up or play them."

Amsterdam, 2018. She first saw Nested Exchange in person at Pattern and Presence, his solo show at Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam earlier in 2018, and spent the following week preparing a talk with him at LIMA, clicking through Deli Near Info, which LIMA was exhibiting and archiving; she notes the invitation came from Jan Robert Leegte.

Death Imitates Language. Writing her earlier Art in America feature on Death Imitates Language, she checked facts with him "thirty times": "Are the pieces painted on paper? (Obviously no.) Do some child images stay virginal? (Yes.) Who wrote the algorithm? (Harm)". The series is "an algorithmic feedback loop being designed to automate Harm's decisions and assumptions and aesthetic values over time", with his "wetware brain" fed back into the cycle; training the algorithm has, he told her, "influenced his own sensitivity for shapes and colors." She concludes: "Software-as-art needs its own language altogether."

Nested Exchange as gossip. The passage the wiki relies on most:

Where Death Imitates models exchange of "DNA," towards aesthetically interesting forms that express, to some degree, an aspect of Harm's taste, the "tree-shaped chromosome ledger exchange" of Nested Exchange is organized around a different principle: how we create provisional and changeable meaning through exchange of information, communication. The artworks' "biological property" is the chromosome; the exchange of genetic information is "gossiping." Nested is multilayered commentary: on how gossip functions as a network, on the social construction of any one piece of information about anything, on the internet as architecture that accelerates this.

In each generation two works are selected and evaluated "for how unique their traits are"; they "flip a node of their nested structure". The algorithms, she writes, "emerged from research of recursion and nesting and feedback, like Christopher Langton's Artificial Life and Seymour Papert's Turtle Graphics." She illustrates nesting with a sentence that grows ambiguous as it is embedded: "Kelly came into the gallery that she owned that her conservative brother funded when the market collapsed and there were no visitors." Of the prints:

These paintings show what each flipped node, each communication exchange produces: rising moons of suggestion, graying or lightening waves of drama, shifts in frenzied speculation, frantic lines of facts, or new plot twists shooting through, or blocks of mimicry and groupthink spreading with little resistance, alliances forming and splitting, terrible rumors sliding along.

She calls this "a perfect summary of the artworld, too, and the construction of an object's value through subjective, abstract, and unquantifiable processes".

The token. "Then there is the distribution of the works, which are registered on the Ethereum blockchain. Every work has a hash, a mark that makes the work itself a currency, a token. Visitors might buy a token through the exhibit, and are so purchasing a moment in the market, a moment of speculation." The token and the ledger, she suggests, "are additional ways to track the aesthetic as a commodity", though "the essence and aura escape, layer, doubles over on itself." She asks: "if we know what happened to the open web, how subversive will blockchain be?", and notes that "there's always un-computable and unpredictable behavior, unruliness and feeling and cronyism and soft power".

Deli Near Info. The second half is on Deli Near Info (delinear.info), "an open social network that consists of clusters of sound, images, and text that are uploaded by users", with "no rules for navigation". She compares it to Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, "an early Tumblr", quotes Che Zara Blomfield's description in Rhizome of "dissociative social media", and writes that it "models a strategy for triggering one's own associative thinking": "There is no stated special goal, no urgency to do anything, no need to make oneself legible." She quotes his reason for building it, that he "did not think many existing systems were free enough".

Ending. "By revealing the mind's flow between systematic and lawlike thinking, to chance thinking, back to lawlike processes, Harm's works suggest our constant evolution through contingency". The last sentence: understanding our associative systems "helps make being nested, unfixed avatars within a global networked organism of machines seem a little less like a cage and more like an opportunity."

The essay's notes cite the Metropolis M interview "Harm van den Dorpel: Choosing Complexity" (December 2015/January 2016), the Pattern and Presence text on harmvandendorpel.com (the title "taken from the book How We Became Posthuman" by N. Katherine Hayles; the genetic algorithms traced to Papert's turtle graphics, Varela and Maturana's autopoiesis and Langton's artificial life), and Khan's Art in America feature "Family Function", edited by Brian Droitcour.