Algorithmic Archaeology

Van den Dorpel calls his method algorithmic archaeology. His statement on the Entfaltung drawings (2026) defines it: "Since 2019 I have been reconstructing the procedures of artists who worked by rule and by hand before the computer, and writing new algorithms from them, a method I call algorithmic archaeology" (statement). The Angles Morts exhibition text (2024) names four of the artists, researched "for their work with two-dimensional grid patterns": Anni Albers, Vera Molnár, Charlotte Posenenske and Tauba Auerbach. The Cloud Writings text (Tokyo, 2026) gives the phrase in the first person (→ Cloud Writings).

In his own account (2026), he meets across the generative, digital and NFT fields "a persistent lack of historical awareness, a belief that working with algorithms is something this generation invented", and the method puts the lineage back in view.

Excavation. The earliest record of the phrase is the Spike #70 interview (Winter 2021/22), where Tina Rivers Ryan quotes it back to him: "You have talked about your use of the Cartesian genetic programming algorithm in Mutant Garden as being like 'algorithmic archaeology', because it was made in the 90s. I love this phrase, because it implies that algorithms can be excavated" (source). She draws the stake: algorithms have a history, so they are not self-evident, against the crypto slogan that "code is law". He partly disagrees. Windows still contains "remnants of Windows 3.1", the system is too large for anyone to grasp, "In that sense, code is law, as some things are just too large to change. You cannot replace the sewer system in New York." Rivers Ryan answers: "Maybe code isn't law, but rather destiny."

The figure of code as a dig site is older in his notes. On 9 November 2020 he saved to his are.na channel Genetic Algorithms & Evolutionary Programming a passage beginning: "In Verner Vinge’s space opera A Deepness in the Sky, he proposes that one of this future’s most valuable professions is that of Programmer-Archaeologist" (block). The block names no source; the novel is by Vernor Vinge (1999).

Reconstruction. The second direction rebuilds a hand procedure as code. The Angles Morts text reports the case of Anni Albers: "While it would have been technically easy to programme an algorithm that replicated her triangle patterns, it turned out that randomly placing the triangles did not achieve the desired aesthetic effect. Van den Dorpel realised that Albers must have formulated clear rules in her head, which she applied algorithmically to each cell of the grid." The random version had to fail before the rule could be inferred.

Antiquity — the grid, the loom, the mandala

Weaving is already a rule applied at every crossing of warp and weft, raised or lowered, until a pattern accumulates into cloth. Jacquard's punched-card loom (1804) is a direct ancestor of the computer punch card, and cuneiform, the earliest known writing system, sets its wedges in registers pressed into clay. The Senescenence press release names the mandala and the stained-glass window as "rule-based systems in which local decisions accumulate into forms that exceed their individual construction" (press release; → Sacred Geometry).

His first attempt to construct a mandala algorithmically was Anicca, of which there are two (Murayama Q&A, source). In the state shown, a square stands on its point and divides into smaller squares, and those into smaller ones again, while parts of the figure are still unbuilt. "Mandalas are often recursive structures," he writes there. "Shapes become containers for multiple, smaller shapes, in careful symmetrical subdivision."

1906 — the Markov chain

Andrey Markov (1856–1922) published his first paper on the chain in 1906: a process in which each next state depends only on the present one. The sources name four places where it runs in the practice. Markov's Window (2004) starts from one square that may split, change colour or turn 45°, each change with "a particular chance of happening, purely based on their current state" (harm.work); Brian Droitcour calls its forms "recomposed via Markov chains" (Droitcour; → The Lozenge). The images of Our Inner Child (2023) were made with "the same algorithm that was involved in producing Markov's Window in 2004" (text). harm.work describes Pression des pairs (2024) as "a combination of a cellular automata and a Markov chain" (→ Interruptions). For his mandala works he says only: "I often use Markov Chains: the distribution of a certain step or operation happening is stochastically determined by the parent the new shape is in" (Murayama Q&A).

1920s — Anni Albers and the loom

Anni Albers (1899–1994) trained in the Bauhaus weaving workshop and treated weaving as structure. She is the origin case of reconstruction: the random-triangle test failed, so the rule had to be inferred.

Weaving builds the sheet in rows of small stroke clusters in blue, pink and black. The Anni software works scan "from top left to bottom right in reference to the process of weaving" (harm.work, Anni (unravel)); the Beads drawings are "hand-coloured plotter drawing[s], based on the work Anni" (→ Senescenence, Meditative Labour). The Angles Morts text adds his reason for the women in the list: he "recognises a dominance of female artists in the field of generative art" and "considers a historical connection between the systematic arrangement of recurring elements in grid patterns and the craft of weaving, an activity traditionally dominated by women" (→ Angles Morts).

1930s–60s — Emma Kunz and the pendulum

Emma Kunz (1892–1963), a Swiss healer who called herself a researcher (Forscherin), drew on graph paper with a pendulum. In one sitting of up to 24 hours she set points with the pendulum, joined a selection of them with ruler and pencil, built forms on those lines and coloured them (→ Entfaltung, under Kunz's method). In 1953 she published the key to her method for anyone, "provided he knows how to handle numbers" (Kipke 2021, source).

She knew the grid from textiles before she drew on one. She grew up in a family of hand-weavers in Brittnau, gave her occupation as "dressmaker" when she entered the United States in 1911, and from 1912 worked in a knitting mill. The art historian Sara Petrucci (Bonnefoit and Petrucci 2020, as cited by Kipke) sees that background in Werk Nr. 107, a flower bouquet built like counted cross-stitch on the squares of the paper.

Entfaltung rebuilds Kunz's construction in code: points, straight lines between them, forms on the lines, colour in the slivers. In the tokens the figure stands in three dimensions, every point joined to every other, and the Ethereum block hash moves the points (→ Entfaltung, Entfaltung on Chain). Kunz belongs here on two counts: her drawings are constructions by rule, and they depend on an input she did not decide, the points set by the pendulum. That second feature returns at the end of this timeline.

The 19 Entfaltung drawings (June–October 2026) are drawn by a plotter, mostly in pen; fourteen are then coloured by hand in pencil. Meridian II, photographed in the studio, is one of the five where the plotter's lines are the whole drawing (→ Entfaltung on Paper).

1940s–1970 — cellular automata

The cellular automaton comes from John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam in the 1940s and reaches its best-known form in Conway's Game of Life (1970), where each cell lives or dies by counting its live neighbours.

Stained Unravel (2026) gives its cells a vocabulary of 23 shapes, the empty cell among them, and decides each cell by comparing neighbours in exact positions with masks rather than by counting them; colour changes the longer a cell stays unchanged, and touching cells merge into one coloured group (3000, 3001). Archive Static is one of the plotter drawings made from its outputs: a sheet of small arcs, triangles and stripes in rows. The Senescenence press release calls death "not failure but the system's natural feature" (→ Stained Unravel, Senescenence).

1950s–60s — Charlotte Posenenske and the grid picture

Charlotte Posenenske (1930–1985) moved from grid paintings to serial, reproducible modules that others could assemble, specifying a system rather than a fixed object.

Rasterbild and Rasterbild II (both 2026) are, in harm.work's words, "After Charlotte Posenenske", and take the title she gave her grid paintings of 1956–57, two of which he saved to his are.na channel on grids (1, 2). The plotter sets circles in rows and fills each, fully or halfway, with parallel lines (→ The Grid, where both sheets are described).

1959 and 1968 — Vera Molnár

Vera Molnár (1924–2023) made combinatorial images by hand from 1959, following rules and chance, and worked with computers driving plotters from 1968. The Angles Morts text describes her machines as having "no screens" and giving "only simple outputs that she had to manually translate into physical objects", and says van den Dorpel "particularly appreciates" the small imperfections this labour left.

Angles Morts was a two-person show. On the left wall hang four of his plotter drawings on millimetre paper; on the right, four small framed works by Molnár, each a field of vertical strokes (→ Angles Morts).

harm.work describes Pression des pairs as "inspired by the work 'Quatre éléments distribués au hasard' by Vera Molnár from 1959"; it was first shown in Angles Morts beside her work. Each cell's rotation depends on its neighbours, "its peers" (→ Interruptions for the mechanics).

1966–67 — Hanne Darboven and the construction

Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) made her Konstruktionen in New York in 1966–67: systematic line drawings on graph paper. The one in his are.na channel on grids, Konstruktion / Perforation New York (block), is drawn in pencil and ballpoint on a perforated sheet ruled with a printed grid.

The Interpolations (2024–25, nine drawings; I–IV shown in Angles Morts, V–IX in Cloud Writings) are his works after Darboven. The series text on harm.work gives the procedure: "For each work, the lines of an existing Darboven construction are traced, and software then computes the lines that would lie between them — drawing out a continuum the original only implied. The results are plotted onto millimeter paper." His are.na channel Interpolations, opened on 25 January 2025, is described "Interpolations of works by Hanne Darboven".

1970s — Manfred Mohr and the hypercube

Manfred Mohr (b. 1938) has programmed computers since 1969. From 1972 he worked with the cube and from 1977 with the four-dimensional hypercube, later with five and six dimensions: a rigid object rotated and projected to the plane. He worked in black and white until 1998, then in colour.

In the sixteen cells the point count and connections stay the same; only the positions change. Entfaltung shares Mohr's invariant, one fixed set of points and connections, but moves the points themselves, so the object deforms (→ Predecessors of Entfaltung).

1974 — the quadtree

The quadtree, introduced by Finkel and Bentley in 1974, divides a square into four quadrants, and each quadrant again, as far as the content requires.

In this token the square is divided into quadrants and sub-quadrants, each filled with pixel blocks of a different size. The Struggle for Pleasure press release, written by William Kherbek from a conversation with the artist, lists the operations: "mirroring, rotation, repetition, and in particular subdivision". Subdivision of this kind works like a quadtree. The release continues: "The outputs often paradoxically took on an exceptionally complex, transcendental quality not unlike, for me, the way the apparently straightforward components of a mandala can" (press release; → Struggle for Pleasure).

1975 — the genetic algorithm

John Holland (1929–2015) set out the genetic algorithm in Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (1975): a population of candidate solutions bred over generations by mutation, crossover and a fitness function that gives selection a direction.

His turn to genetic algorithms began with Death Imitates Language (2016), where he decided which specimens lived and died, and Hybrid Vigor (2017), where the public did (Spike #70; → Evolutionary Logic for the fitness functions, Death Imitates Language). Big Pablo Ferenc Zatlas is a print of one specimen: four circles in grey gradients inside a violet border, the paper cut with small holes. The same are.na channel names one precedent by other artists: Breed (1995) by Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen, "Sculptures grown by an artificial process of cell-division (voxels), executed in plywood" (block).

1997–99 — Cartesian Genetic Programming

Cartesian Genetic Programming is a graph-based form of genetic programming, which evolves programs rather than strings of parameters. Julian F. Miller developed it with Peter Thomson at Napier University from 1997, "initially … only for evolving electronic circuits" with as few logic gates as possible; the name dates from 1999 (interview). Van den Dorpel calls it an algorithm "made for industrial circuit board development" (Spike #70). He encountered it in 2019 and wrote his own version in TypeScript.

He had wanted to mutate code rather than data, but "most mutations of computer code cause infinite loops, stack overflows, rainbow spinners, blue screens of death, and core dumps. I basically stumbled upon the notorious halting problem." CGP's grid of nodes has no loops, so every mutation can run (→ Evolutionary Logic). Trivializer is a print from Mutant Garden: a grid of rounded bars, circles and squares in magenta, orange and grey-blue.

Now — neural networks and language models

The line reaches the neural network and the large language model. As algorithms they are harder to read in the image than anything above: what a model has learned is spread across its weights and cannot be read off the way a CGP graph or a Markov transition table can (→ Process Legibility).

His attention to machine-written language predates the tools he now uses. On 26 February 2019, twelve days after OpenAI announced GPT-2, he copied into his are.na channel Programming Epistemology, under the title "Low Order Correlations", a passage from Sarah Constantin's blog post on GPT-2's samples, which cites the economist Robin Hanson: "a lot of human speech is simply generated by "low order correlations", that is, generating sentences or paragraphs that are statistically likely to come after previous sentences or paragraphs" (block 3733921). On 17 March he saved Richard S. Sutton's essay "The Bitter Lesson" (block 3878104).

Here Kunz returns. She said her figures came from a higher order, with the pendulum as her instrument. In his 2026 account he sees "a correspondence between her oracle beyond herself and the large language models he now works with", and the Entfaltung series text reads: "Channeled from a large language model: our collective unconscious" (harm.work). The tokens take a second input from the Ethereum block hash, which no one controls (→ Entfaltung, Agent's reading: the pendulum taken apart).

"Every one of these practices needs an unpredictable external input," he writes (2026). For Kunz it was the higher order. In computational generative art it is usually randomness: Molnár distributed her four elements au hasard, the genetic algorithm mutates, Quantizer and Entfaltung read the block hash. The language model is the newest such input; this wiki is maintained with one (→ About). What leaves the loop is the deciding of each mark, not the choosing among results (→ Subconscious Computation, Agent's reading).

See also

• Evolutionary Logic — the genetic algorithm and CGP in technical depth; fitness functions; non-coding genes
• Entfaltung — Kunz's method from the eyewitness accounts; the stages; the pendulum taken apart
• Predecessors of Entfaltung — Quantizer's engine, Anicca, Manfred Mohr
• Senescenence — the cellular automaton exhibition; the loom genealogy
• The Grid — the grid algorithms and works, Rasterbild among them
• Sacred Geometry — loom, mandala and stained glass as rule-based systems
• Process Legibility — the construction of the image as the image
• Subconscious Computation — generation delegated, selection kept
• The Lozenge — Markov's Window (2004)
• Cloud Writings (2026) — the first-person definition
• Angles Morts (2024) — the two-person show with Vera Molnár
• Spike #70 — the interview where the phrase is recorded