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Colour Configurations (2019–2022)

Colour Configurations is five images, each described in its token as "Generated with my early implementation of Cartesian genetic programming / Harm van den Dorpel, 2019 - 2022 / PNG RGB 8 bit, 5556 × 5556 px". Cartesian genetic programming (CGP) represents a program as a grid of function nodes; mutation rewires the nodes, and selection keeps or discards the result. The artist began working with it in March 2019, and the same algorithm, developed further, breeds the specimens of Mutant Garden (→ Evolutionary Logic, CGP — Julian F. Miller interview).

Two panels side by side: at left, vertical stripes of many colours, some framed in black; at right, a soft grid of lilac, pink, grey and orange cells
Colour Configuration Pair, are.na, 27 March 2019

Two square panels side by side. In the left one, vertical stripes of different widths run the full height, some of them framed in black and divided into stacked cells of colour; in the right one, columns of soft-edged cells in lilac, pink, grey and orange form an even grid. The artist saved the image to his are.na channel Modular Aesthetic Systems on 27 March 2019 under the title Colour Configuration Pair.

Two pairs, four tokens

The channel has two such pairs, the first works of the artist's own in it (sources/ingested/arena-modular-aesthetic-systems.md). The other, saved a day earlier, on 26 March, and captioned "Cartesian genetic programming" (block), sets a panel of a few large fields in red, orange and brown beside one divided into many small rectangles. Compared with the tokens, each pair turns out to be two of them side by side: the halves of the red pair are Colour Configuration #3 and #4, the halves of the pair above are #2 and #1. The work began as comparisons, two outputs set side by side, and was issued as single images two and a half years later.

The four went to Zora in October and December 2021: Colour Configuration #1, Colour Configuration #2, Colour Configuration #3 and Colour Configuration #4; the numbers in their harm.work addresses are Zora's token IDs. Colour Configuration #5 followed on 22 December 2021 on the artist's own contract. Mutant Garden Seeder, bred by the same algorithm, had been released earlier in 2021.

Colour Configuration 2: vertical stripes of many widths, several framed in black, with two wide columns of soft pale colour at the right
Colour Configuration #2
Colour Configuration 3: a large brown field over a large red one at left, thin vertical bars in the middle, small stacked rectangles at right, all in reds and oranges inside a salmon border
Colour Configuration #3
Colour Configuration 5: a grid of orange, pink, navy and black squares under translucent bands, divided by thin white lines
Colour Configuration #5

The five images

#1 is the soft grid: about eighteen columns of uneven width, each split into cells whose colour fades towards the edges, lilac and grey with spots of red, orange and turquoise. It is reproduced on The Grid.

#2 is the striped panel: narrow vertical bands of many colours, several of them framed in black and divided into cells, and at the right two wide columns of pale green, pink, cyan and lavender.

#3 divides the square into three: at left a brown field above a red one, in the middle thin vertical bars on orange, at right small rectangles stacked in olive, orange and red, the whole inside a salmon border. It is the plainest of the five and the closest to a composition by hand.

#4 is the most subdivided. Rectangles in reds, pinks and oranges sit inside other rectangles, many filled with horizontal bands, some with a brick or lattice texture. harm.work serves it at 640 pixels only; it can be seen as the right half of the red pair on the are.na channel page.

#5 stands apart from the pairs: a grid of squares in orange, pink, navy blue and black, overlaid by translucent bands along the top and the right edge and cut by thin white lines, so that the cells look stacked rather than placed side by side.

Grid and nesting

The images show the two structures the practice moved between in 2019. #4 and the red pair nest rectangles inside rectangles; #1 and #5 are grids. The Grid dates the turn to this week of March 2019: the artist's channel Nesting stopped receiving his own work, the grid channel received its first works of his own, these pairs, and the program behind them is itself "a two-dimensional grid: nodes and layers". In Colour Configurations the grid of the genome first reached the picture. There the grid is the genome, and in the grid page's words "its whole purpose is to change"; the five tokens are what was kept of it.

See also