H

Algues Artificielles

Algues Artificielles (2016–2022) is the series in which van den Dorpel first derived a generative system directly from natural observation and then submitted it to a formal breeding mechanism — converting the artist's aesthetic judgment into an explicit fitness function. It sits structurally between wiki/death-imitates-language (artist as sole, private selector) and later work where selection is systematised or crowdsourced.

The series title translates literally as Artificial Seaweeds: the natural form that prompted the code, and the artificial form that replaced it.

Torn split
Torn split (2016) — 100×80cm; one of the earliest prints, drawn from the first generation of the genetic system

Origin: Bretagne, seaweed, Hans Arp

The series began in the summer of 2016, during a family stay by the sea in Bretagne, France. The artist describes watching seaweed and jellyfish wash ashore, forming "shapes and compositions which were always different, but, also, somehow always the same." This paradox — variation within a conserved type — became the problem the system would be built to explore.

A first attempt at simulating the smooth, round curves proved "surprisingly satisfying." The shapes reminded him of the sculptural work of Hans Arp — biomorphic abstraction, organic without being figurative. But pure random generation "was quickly becoming a bit boring": it produced variety without direction. The question shifted: could a feedback process between artist and software "be considered a kind of dialectic"?

This shift — from generating shapes to designing the conditions under which shapes improve — marks the conceptual core of the series and of the broader practice. See wiki/impulse-risk-method on the movement from discovery (pure randomness) to method (constrained, directed variation), and wiki/randomness-pattern on the distinction between randomness and generative pattern.

Mechanism: digital genome and convergent breeding

The system is precisely described in the artist statement. Every visual property of a drawing — "angles, smoothness, shape, colour, transparency, scale, position" — is encoded in a binary sequence: a digital genome. This genome "hermetically defines the appearance (or phenotype) of each work (or specimen)."

Breeding works as crossover: two selected parent drawings have their chromosomes aligned; genes are drawn at random from either parent. "From this game of recombination, both iterative and diverse offspring emerge."

Each generation, the artist picks two specimens to breed from. Because breeding always occurs between siblings — "a sort of mechanical incest" — the diversity gradually converges. The population narrows toward a local optimum shaped by the artist's accumulated choices. Van den Dorpel names this "hybrid vigour": the process of selecting candidates, examining results, and breeding further to "eliminate or emphasise particular traits."

This is the same convergence logic that governs animal and plant domestication — artificial selection as the model for aesthetic development. For the technical genealogy of this mechanism across the full series (including Cartesian Genetic Programming in Mutant Garden), see wiki/evolutionary-logic.

Hybrid Vigor .bio
Hybrid Vigor .bio (2017) — the public website that crowd-sources the fitness function: internet visitors replace the artist as selector

Hybrid Vigor .bio: crowdsourcing the fitness function

The series culminates in a structural inversion: Hybrid Vigor .bio (2017) opens the selection mechanism to the public. The website is "publicly accessible to crowd-source this process in an evolutionarily selective way, using the internet visitor as the fitness function." The artist steps back from the role of selector; the population now evolves under distributed aesthetic pressure from anonymous web visitors.

This is the first instance in the practice where personal taste is fully externalised and collectivised — a step toward the systemic protocols traced in wiki/protocol-taste-systems. The transition mirrors the difference between the closed studio and the open network: from private dialectic to distributed selection.

The companion software Algues Artificielles (2017) — a macOS application — runs the same genetic engine locally, without the crowd. It is the private version of the same mechanism.

The prints: frozen specimens

When a specimen reaches a locally optimal state, it is printed: UltraChrome or Ultrachrome HDR inkjet on Hahnemühle German Etching paper, 80×65cm or 100×80cm (early works). These are the frozen records of evolutionary convergence — a single generation preserved in archival pigment.

Eponymous Seedling
Eponymous Seedling (2018) — Ultrachrome HDR print on Hahnemühle paper, 80×65cm; the nomenclature pattern — adjective-noun English compounds — names a compositional state, not a subject

The names

The work titles — Torn split, Dechayotic, Adoreway, Bemused Aversatility, Eponymous Seedling, Umbilical Dramatoxin — are English adjective-noun compounds that are grammatically plausible but semantically wrong. Unlike the invented syllables of Death Imitates Language (Vvgdamn, Shtonk), these titles almost mean something. Dechayotic suggests "de-chaotic." Umbilical Dramatoxin is a medical-poetic collision. They occupy the threshold between found language and generated language — just as the images occupy the threshold between observed form (seaweed) and computed form.

This is one register of the "development of meaning in generative aesthetics": meaning emerges at the edge of recognisability, not from pure invention or pure reference.

Shunned Mass (2022)

Shunned Mass (2022) is the NFT extension of the series — a single work minted on-chain years after the main body of prints, extending the series into the blockchain context. Its existence points to the longevity of the genetic system: the algorithm remains generative across a six-year span and across medium formats.

Shunned Mass
Shunned Mass (2022) — NFT; the system extended into the blockchain context, six years after the first prints

Connections