Codec Breeze
Codec Breeze (2008) is a series of four short videos that sit between photograph and film: Trees, Plastic Plant, Smoke and Baptism. The title names the effect literally, "the little breeze caused by a codec". Each work is a still photograph in which only the parts that might be alive have been set moving, not by filming them but by pushing them through a bad compressor. The artist dates it 2008 (November 2026), as does the Club Internet record of Contact (1997), the show curated by Damon Zucconi in July–August 2008 in which a piece from it was shown (→ Club Internet); harm.work gives 2009.
The mechanism is a mask. Van den Dorpel takes a still photograph, selects the regions that could plausibly be alive (leaves, water, smoke) and runs only those regions through a deliberately low-quality codec. The rest of the frame stays a sharp still. The encoded regions shimmer and wobble from compression interference alone, so the picture reads as a photograph that has started to breathe in places. As he puts it in the 2009 conversation with his parents (Codec Breeze — conversation with the artist's parents): "Most areas in the image are still, but here you can see a bit of movement... you can't really tell anymore if it's a photo that we are looking at or maybe a slow-moving patch of mist."
The source of the effect
The observation came from television. Watching Animal Planet or National Geographic, he noticed that a still shot always stayed sharp, but the moment the camera swept or "a huge school of fish swam past," the image was "too big to pass through the TV cable wire" and broke into blocks. The picture failed because it carried too much information at once. Most viewers read that blockiness as a fault in the transmission. Van den Dorpel kept it as the subject.
His refinement was to remove the actual motion and keep only the artefact. A still photograph is recorded as video at low quality, so "the image would move just from the interference." He links the result to online video: on YouTube even a film where nothing happens carries this low-grade movement, so "you don't always know for sure if a still shot is actually still or if it's a filmed still shot." Codec Breeze isolates that uncertainty and makes it the whole work.
The four films
Trees. This was the film he showed first. Tall conifers stand in fog, with a low raised bed of bushes in the middle distance; he describes it to his parents as "bushes in a raised bed in a park" and later as "a group of small trees in a park". One parent first read the shapes as figures ("I thought those were people") and did not see the movement: "I hate to say it, but I don't really see it." Only closer up did it register, and as weather: "Oh, yes, now I see it. It really is like mist." The encoded foliage moves as wind or fog would, motion with no locatable cause.
Plastic Plant. White artificial flowers in a white pot stand on a grey surface in a bare corner, and their foliage is passed through the codec. The region chosen as possibly alive is the one thing in the frame that never was, and the compressor animates it anyway. The codec produces the appearance of life wherever the mask is drawn.
Smoke. Here the encoded region is the smoke, "the only thing that's moving, although it doesn't dissipate." Real smoke thins and disperses; this smoke churns in place. It is "already a bit strange," he tells his parents, and "that could generate a certain fascination."
Baptism. The concept is most exposed here. The photograph shows water poured from a white bowl over a young woman's head. Van den Dorpel kept the whole picture still "except for the part that is water," which he ran through the codec, so the frame carries a seam between the sharp photograph and the moving, blocky water. The choice is deliberate: baptism is a rite performed in water, and the encoding disturbs the water. "The spiritual significance of baptism is underscored by the randomness in the codec," he says; "the random layer from the encoding converges with the religious significance of baptism."
Chance given a spiritual reading
The compression artefacts are "essentially random," and van den Dorpel equates the interference with chance and gives the chance "a sort of spiritual significance." The wiki reads this as an early, explicit case of a thread that runs through the practice, chance as a carrier of meaning (→ Randomness and Pattern), and places it, though he names neither, beside the chance procedures of Hans Arp and John Cage. Where the later generative work gives chance a direction with a fitness function, Codec Breeze aims the randomness at subjects already charged with meaning and lets the two register in one frame.
In Baptism the sacrament's own medium becomes the site of the machine's randomness. Chance is less foreign to the father's tradition than it may look: Scripture treats the cast lot as an instrument of providence ("The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD", Proverbs 16:33, NIV). Read against that theology, what the film lacks is an authority that would sanction this reading of chance, not a place for chance itself.
The uncertainty whether the image is a photograph or a video is part of the work. N. Katherine Hayles's flickering signifier, the digital sign prone to "unexpected metamorphoses" (quoted without attribution in 805; → Mediation and the Archive), is here slowed to a crawl. The picture never resolves into either a still or a moving image.
Two spiritualities
His parents were not a naive audience. In 2009 his father was an evangelical Protestant preacher who had studied theology, and the son had grown up inside that theology from about the age of eleven, when his father converted (→ Apophatic Theology). Both read the sacred closely. The disagreement over the work's "spiritual significance" is between two spiritualities that work in different ways.
The father's theology rests on the authority of scripture. Its claims stand because scripture asserts them, and baptism means what scripture says it means, rebirth and the washing away of sin, a content that is given and not the individual's to revise. Read against that theology, his question asks for a meaning of that kind, authorised and placed there to be found: "So where exactly is the clue? … Maybe I'm just not smart enough, but I have no idea about how I'm supposed to make the link." He puts it modestly, but on this reading the difficulty is not one of intelligence. Nothing in scripture underwrites calling the codec's randomness "spiritual," so the claim does not resolve into anything he can accept.
Harm's spirituality stands on a different footing: non-dogmatic, open to revision, geared by a meditative practice instead of a source of authority. The numinous is what attention finds, here in chance, the artefact, the loss of control. He keeps the shape of his father's faith, the word spiritual, the water, the rite of baptism, and leaves its content open to the randomness of the codec. That is why he can say that viewers "don't have to know that it's called 'codec'": fascination comes before understanding, and a spirituality grounded in attention does not need the authorised clue his father looks for. The wiki later named this structure "religious in shape, not in content" (its own formula, in Propositions 5.4); the 2009 conversation is an earlier, unformulated case of it.
Asked how much it matters that people grasp the concept, he says it is "somewhat important," but that what matters most is that the piece is "visually engaging, so that people will want to look at it" (→ Process Legibility). The transcript's last line belongs to his mother. The father, the theologian, searches for the clue, cannot find it, and turns to her: "What about you?" She says only "I sense it." Apprehension without a proposition, with no scripture behind it, is the register the work asks for, and her sensing is the nearest the family comes to meeting the work on its own terms.
The conversation was filmed for Lernert & Sander's How to Explain It to My Parents (released 2010), in which artists explain their work to their parents. The archive entry for the work, note 855, contains only its title and a link to the video; the four videos here come from the artist's files and are also on harm.work.