About — Dissociations

This website is the 2026 version of Dissociations, a project begun in 2010. It is an ongoing generative online artist studio, now operating as a self-configuring wiki maintained in collaboration with an LLM. It serves simultaneously as a second brain for Harm van den Dorpel's artistic practice and as a public knowledge base for those seeking a deep engagement with the body of work and its reasoning.

The original project (2010–)

Dissociations began as a concatenation of references, influences, and artworks — made, un-made, or imagined — that gives the studio practice, along with its iterative and aggregative rhythms, a visual form. The numbered entries in sources/ are the raw material: each a node in an expanding network.

The mechanism was manual training. A page would show three items at random — images, texts, artworks. The artist would eliminate the one that intuitively belonged least in the set. From the accumulation of these dismissive dissociations, the mathematical inverse was calculated, revealing — supposedly — what unconsciously appeared most interesting or associatively coherent.

Note 952 (titled Script) gives the philosophical anatomy of this operation:

"For example, let's take a set of three: Palindrome, Twelve, and Energy Drink. The Energy Drink stands out for some particular criteria... Because of this, Twelve and Palindrome are automatically related, and there are negative ties to Energy Drink. Effectively three new relations have now been defined, and we have not sought refuge to seemingly unavoidable proxies such as categories, groups, tags, etc."

Taste as negative selection. Not choosing what to keep, but identifying and removing what fails to cohere — an aesthetic immune system rather than a positive program. The resulting graph of weighted connections is "permanently incomplete": no map, no overview, no taxonomy. Identity is deferred: every node is partially (maybe completely) defined by its associations.

New Museum / First Look (2013)

In 2013, the project was commissioned as part of the New Museum's First Look online exhibition series (co-organized with Rhizome). The New Museum's description articulates the structural ambition precisely:

"The structure of Dissociations is a successive presentation of finite objects in favor of tracking an interval space, where the interrelationships between ideas and forms become the focus rather than the works themselves. Its index is determined by the whims of its underlying system, which van den Dorpel says help him make fresh connections between much worked-over material."

Interval space is the key phrase. The project's subject is not the works but what lies between them — the relational field that only becomes visible through the movement between nodes. This is distinct from an archive or catalogue, which fixes objects in stable positions. Here, position is always relative, always provisional.

Event Listeners
Event Listeners (2021) — web-native NFT series; the browser itself as medium; a later elaboration of the Dissociations logic of accumulation and responsiveness

The Warburg precedent was noted in the New Museum's text: Aby M. Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29) — a library of books, artworks, newspaper clippings, and found objects governed by an "iconology of intervals." Elisabeth Doove writes that "Warburg's non-linear and non-chronological approach seems almost to be a precursor of the cybernetic approach." Dissociations occupies the same lineage: an index whose order is determined by relational logic rather than chronology, medium, or category.

Van den Dorpel described the finished works as "debris of an ongoing activity." The studio practice precedes and exceeds any single work. The Dissociations site makes that excess visible.

The 2026 mutation

With the advent of large language models, the project has mutated. The numbered notes — always the raw stratum — now feed a wiki layer: LLM-generated pages that synthesize, cross-reference, and develop the conceptual content latent in the source material.

The LLM continues the same logic the original system employed: reading relations between disparate nodes, building associative links, surfacing what coheres. The difference is register — from visual/associative to textual/analytical — and direction: where the 2010 system revealed unconscious taste through elimination, the 2026 wiki makes the underlying conceptual terrain explicit. Documentation as constitutive (→ 992).

The site is ongoing. The wiki is not a finished interpretation but an accumulating record of readings, queries, and syntheses. New material is ingested; existing pages are revised as the picture develops.

How to navigate

Key concepts