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Pattern and Presence — press release

Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam, February 2018. Reproduced from the gallery's exhibition page, which credits the photographs to Gert Jan van Rooij. The same text, without its last sentence and the biography, is on harm.work. The wiki's account of the show is Pattern and Presence (Upstream Gallery, 2018).

In his first solo exhibition with Upstream Gallery, Harm van den Dorpel features works from multiple series that react to different moments in the history of cybernetics.

Pattern and Presence, the title of the show, is taken from the book ‘How we became posthuman’ by N. Katherine Hayles (1999), in which she describes the historical development of cybernetics and politics of disembodiment.

Van den Dorpel employs various information technologies from this history of cybernetics in his artistic practice. He wants to demystify both the romantic notion of the ‘artistic genius’ as well as the ‘black box’ of computer algorithms, which increasingly influence our personal lives and forecast our political future. Where other traditional artistic mediums require the artist to create the work with their own hand, Van den Dorpel rather programs software and trains it by looping continuous feedback through its output in order to produce works with unpredictable aesthetic outcomes. In this hybrid process, genetic properties are ascribed to the elements and composition that make up his artworks. By selecting and crossbreeding across many generations, “optimal” artworks emerge.

For this new series of printed transparent work (which is a continuation of his earlier series “Death Imitates Language”) Van den Dorpel focuses on the structure of ‘nesting’: a strong organizing principle found in architecture, software development and human language. The artist draws on this system in order to compare the construction of language to the construction of artworks, and in doing so, refers to the painterly question of how to fill the two-dimensional plane using composition and layering. The genetic algorithms he uses, originate from developments in computer science which emerged in the 1960s through to the 1980s and include: ‘Turtle graphics’ by Seymour Papert (late 1960s); research of feedback, reflexivity, nesting and recursion (Autopoiesis, Varela & Maturana, 1972); and Artificial Life (Christopher Langton, 1986).

Van den Dorpel also draws on recent developments in blockchain technology, specifically the Ethereum blockchain, in order to assign each work a unique identifier (a hash or fingerprint). This functions as a token which can be traded on the Ethereum blockchain and changes the status of the artwork to a form of currency – or a representation of itself – which circles back to the initial question of embodiment: are the works in fact the works? Or, are they representations of an external, less material essence? Do we have a body or are we a body?

Harm van den Dorpel (1981, the Netherlands) lives and works in Berlin. Selected (group) exhibitions include the New Museum in New York, MoMa PS1 in New York, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, ZKM Karlsruhe, and the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam. In 2015, Van den Dorpel started Left Gallery, an online gallery that commissions, produces, and sells downloadable files.

Photos by Gert Jan van Rooij

The artist's project page (February 2018)

The artist's own page for the show, harmvandendorpel.com/pattern-and-presence, dated "February 2018", printed the press text above (without the biography) under an epigraph, followed by links ("Tokens Website (ÐApp)", "Website Upstream Gallery", "Nesting page on are.na") and captioned photographs. The epigraph, linked to a PDF of Hayles's book, quotes her account of Mary Catherine Bateson's Our Own Metaphor (1972) in chapter 3 of How We Became Posthuman*, with "her" and "last" set in brackets:*

We can understand the complexity of the outer world only because our codes for constructing the inner world are similarly diverse and complex. In this sense, we are a metaphor not only for ourselves but also for the larger system in which we are embedded. This leads (her) into a subtly nuanced analysis of couplings between inner world and outer world, including the insight that because the worlds are coupled, they must in the (last) analysis be regarded as a single system.

The captions, in the page's order:

Under the photographs: "See also: Nested Exchange Software".