Revenge of the Spheres

Travis Jeppesen, text for About, Harm van den Dorpel's solo exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery, 50–58 Vyner Street, London, 2 March – 22 April 2012. Reproduced from the press kit in the artist's archive. harm.work prints an excerpt ("He is not aware that a gallery system exists … stabilized meaning") that drops three words of the original: "dialects" after "two separate", "to" before "infiltrate" and "was" in "the virtual was never". The wiki's account of the exhibition is About (Wilkinson Gallery, 2012).

He enters the room, he sees himself entering it. The agency. Sign out front. Reading.
Engulfed by dust of ideals. Dissociate to commemorate.

Some things hang, some things framed on the wall.

How he looks at two dimensions and how he perceives three dimensions.

Going back and forth between the two types of object.

"Nobody cares anymore if something is real. You're no longer a fraud if you make something that doesn't exist."

It wears its limitations like a velvet dress, that arrangement.

Incomplete thought say not what. About.

Harm van den Dorpel's work is about.

The only language worth using is the one that creates a world, rather than merely reflects a pre-existing world. I had nothing to do with.

(For these objects, potentiality remains a problem. Relations not readily apparent. Ekphrasis and resisting, symbols devoid of inhabiting.)

He is born into an evangelical family, father a theologian. Already element of ekphrasis present here, christian doctrine, everything rule-based, law-based. He comprehends concretion of the Law before he reaches an age that allows him to question that, to realize the Law is made to be broken.

At the age of eleven, he discovers computer programming. A new system of laws.

"People don't realize that their lives are being written by infrastructure."
He loves these, all systems. At the same time, he does not believe in them.

Inability to reconcile warring systems. He has a breakdown, enters psychoanalysis at twenty-three. (Not Freudian.) He is finally able to understand the systemic nature of all these systems that have encoded his existence thus far. He finds out that it is his calling: to break them.

1.) history states; 2.) rothko re-writes; 3.) laser cuts

One possible arrangement among many.

There is a redundancy in the image. You only get to it through cognition; the background image is actually the same as the foreground. Reflection, a device, is employed as an effect to create its opposite, distortion.
When he enters the gallery he is confronted with two-dimensional surfaces and three-dimensional objects. Together. What is it that separates these entities besides the mere fact of their dimensionality, the respective illusions they elicit. These are categories, molding perception.
"There are no sketches. Everything is the work."

Programming is his art. He is not aware that a gallery system exists. All his work exists in the virtual sphere, which to him is more real than the reality we all supposedly inhabit in the day-to-day.

That was then. Even now, it doesn't matter to him so much which of his works are realized, in the physical, and which remain virtual. Both, to him, are objects, completed works. They are just said in different ways, enunciated using two separate dialects.

Even language has its defaults.
"Destabilized in Photoshop."
The eventual necessity to enter the gallery system, to infiltrate the physical with his virtual systems, is read as a sort of betrayal by those adherents of his early efforts. In doing so, their misunderstanding of his intentions is revealed. For him, the virtual was never a critique or evasion of the actual. Virtual and actual were always one and the same.

Just as mind is but an extension of body.

The work is always about process, no matter the form it takes. (By necessity, the forms must shift constantly. This is one of the rules of the system. As such, it is also broken; hence, the emergence of interrelations, series.) Conjure a body-mind machine, mattering itself into objects.
The art object is a thing that is permitted to simultaneously be something else. Many things at once, that thing. Can we keep track of it, its vehicular motions, through our established categories. Should we allow those categories some slippage. Perhaps apply some slippage: lube them up, recognize their mutability, their indifference to our yearnings for stabilized meaning. Then we are left as ghosts, wandering through some foreign, unreadable terrain: not an unenviable position to be in.

Burn those perceptual fields.
To see through blindness, feeling, is the goal.

"All objects have decorative potential" -- but not all objects have utilitarian value. A mock-up of things that might exist for nothing.

What that might mean: to exist for nothing.

Perhaps none of these issues are important. When he walks in, when we walk in, when the space is entered and the object-perceiving begins, perhaps the sole question we, as judges, need ask ourselves, is to what degree the object is determined and to what degree it is spontaneous. Of course every object must need be determined to an extent -- otherwise, it could not exist! -- but how does it wear its traces of determination, or has it been able to repel most of those, either through a clever act of concealment on the part of the maker or through an abrupt, "natural" process of irruption into being?

Most thought is an accident. The object should yearn to bear as close a resemblance to pure thought as it can.

"Many details only become known to us as we progress." Many deaths only become known to us as we progress.

Virtual version, in a sense, protects the actual, because it is damn near impossible to make out what the materials are meant to be. Tactility, in the normative sense, is off-limits.

culture = biology = technology
Entering the space gives us an experience that is quite other. We must come to an understanding of the objects, formulate a potentiality of relations. Or judge them disparately, by their properties. The ways in which they come alive for us. Or don't.

Spheres literalized.
What happens in the mind.
Confrontation between object-being and body-mind vehicle.

Assemblage theory disassembled.
Disassemblage theory, actualized.
These things only look like collages.

Now, he spends his days data-mining his own intuitive systems. He puts the results out there on the web for all to see. Click on an image, you'll get a different arrangement each time. All arrangements, however, have been preordained.

There is a god in every machine.