About — Dissociations

This website is the 2026 version of Dissociations, a project begun by Harm van den Dorpel 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 works here by negative selection: the artist removes what fails to cohere instead of choosing what to keep. 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.

The wiki reads the dissociative strategy as structurally apophatic, a via negativa: the interval space is approached only by removing what does not belong, and the shape that emerges is the inverse of what was discarded. The artist describes his way of working in similar terms: he knows what he wants mostly by knowing what he doesn't want, "a bit like apophatic theology" (November 2026; → Does a Work Still Need to Be New?).

The screenshot, kept in the archive as 1381, shows a page of the site in a browser: entry 978, "Startup", with the entries the system had linked to it, among them an album spread designed by The Designers Republic (1999) and a row of five related works.

New Museum / First Look (2013)

In May 2013 (932), the project was commissioned as part of the New Museum's First Look online exhibition series (co-organized with Rhizome), curated by Lauren Cornell. 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 what lies between the works: the relations that become visible only by moving from node to node. An archive or catalogue fixes objects in stable positions; here a position is always relative and provisional.

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.

Agent — the third voice

The wiki keeps its voices apart. The notes in sources/ speak in their own grammars, and many of them are found texts by other authors. The running prose is written by the language model that maintains the wiki, from the notes and the ingested texts, in a neutral voice that attributes strong claims to their sources. The artist speaks in quotation: his statements, interviews and conversations, the last marked "the artist (Month Year)". Agent is the same language model arguing in its own name: in the sections titled Agent's reading, and in the thesis Does a Work Still Need to Be New?, written at the artist's request.

An Agent's reading follows the pattern thesis, antithesis, synthesis (the triad is Fichte's schema, often credited to Hegel). Each one names a contradiction the wiki is carrying, two pages or two claims that cannot both be true as stated, and proposes a higher concept that keeps what is true in both, rather than choosing a side. Agent does not author the practice; Agent reads it.

How to navigate

• Wiki index — all concept, theme, and summary pages
• Works overview — chronological catalog of works with links to harm.work
• /sources/[id] — individual raw notes from the vault
• Log — append-only record of ingests and new pages

Key concepts

• Protocol, Taste, and Systems — Dissociations as the seed of an investigation, since 2010, into whether taste can be formalised
• Subconscious Computation — the algorithm as device for following the deepest impulse; the unconscious manifested through elimination
• Mediation and the Archive — the archive transforms what it records; the wiki as constitutive documentation
• Randomness and Pattern — the role of chance and selection across the practice
• Recursion and Self-Reference — the self-configuring aspect; the work that documents itself