Small Collections

harm.work lists some of van den Dorpel's tokens in small collections that have no series of their own. Four of them are set out here: JPGs, still images; Single Specimens, specimens of a bred population; Monaco Mix, one of his earliest Ethereum tokens; and Sources, the source files of plotter drawings. The editioned programs are on Software.

JPGs

JPGs is described on harm.work as "Still images, sometimes one-of-one, sometimes in edition". It lists 25 tokens for twelve images, minted between 2021 and 2023, of works made from 2005 on. The token descriptions read like catalogue entries, giving year made, year minted, pixel size and file size: "Harm van den Dorpel (b. 1981), 'Owl.jpg' (1/3), 2005, .JPG, 3127x4000 Pixels, 3.1 MB, Edition 3 + 1AP, Created 2005, Minted 2022."

Art Gallery 1–3 (2008)

Art Gallery 1: a woman with long hair looks at framed pictures in an office gallery; one frame shows the back of a head with long hair — *Art Gallery 1* (2008)

Art Gallery 3: three visitors with name badges stand under framed pictures of trousered legs and a plant — *Art Gallery 3* (2008)

The token text: "This is one image from a series of four, originally posted by the artist on the surf club Spirit Surfers under the monikor 'INFOsembler', in 2008. The photos used were accidentally found with Google Image Search, and manipulated with Adobe Photoshop." Each is a snapshot of a low-ceilinged office gallery: ceiling tiles, fluorescent panels, potted plants, framed pictures on white walls. The pictures in the frames have been replaced by details cut from the same photograph. In Art Gallery 1 a woman with long hair looks at a frame that shows the back of her own head; the frame beside it shows the potted plant from the corner. In Art Gallery 3 three visitors with name badges stand under a picture of a pair of trousered legs. The gallery shows nothing but itself. Art Gallery 2 completes the three on harm.work; each was issued in three editions through left gallery in 2021. Spirit Surfers and the surf clubs are on Surf Clubs; the picture that contains its own viewer is the form of Recursion.

Owl.jpg (2005) and Goat.jpg (2008)

Owl.jpg: a grey screech owl on a lichen-covered branch, cut apart along straight lines, with four yellow-ringed eyes floating across sky and body — *Owl.jpg* (2005), JPEG, 3127 × 4000 pixels

Owl.jpg is a photograph of a grey screech owl on a lichen-covered branch against a deep blue sky. The bird has been cut apart along straight lines, its head shifted up and to the right, and four yellow-ringed eyes of different sizes float across sky and body; only one of them sits in the head. It is from the same year as Owl, the owl in the Pixel Sorters that he erased by hand. Goat.jpg (2008) is a goat on grass in front of felled logs, blurred into a white smudge; it is the picture harm.work lists as Gaussian Goat in Animal Configurations, the series of found animal pictures that harm.work dates to 2007. Both were minted in 2022 in editions of three with a proof.

Merch Clouds (2019)

Merch Clouds: an aerial photograph of farmland with a cloud and its shadow, and three small coloured rectangles set into the fields — *Merch Clouds* (2019), fine art print, DIN A1

Merch Clouds is a fine art print on archival paper, DIN A1 (594 × 841 mm), "Inspired by a design by Laurel Schwulst" (token text), in an edition of 32, sold through left gallery with international shipping; each token also links the 379 MB TIFF. The image is an aerial photograph of square fields and a highway; a cumulus cloud floats over them with its shadow on the ground below, and three small flat rectangles, yellow, green and blue, sit in the fields as if they were plots of land. harm.work lists four tokens, 17/32, 18/32, 19/32 and 20/32. The poster was made for rite of access, left gallery's takeover of Stroom Den Haag in the autumn of 2019, whose exhibition design was by Schwulst; the list of works gives it as "merch clouds — poster — by harm van den dorpel" (press release). left gallery's page of October 2019 offered it as an "ultrachrome hdr print on hahnemühle fine art paper" that "comes hand signed + rite of access card", in an edition of 25 (archived). By August 2020 the edition was 32 and the page added: "half the proceeds will be donated to the electronic frontier foundation" (archived); the line is gone from the page by April 2021.

Hands, Rug and the single images

Hands: two open hands overlapping, seen through a red vignette — *Hands* (2012)

Slanty Chunk: overlapping red and crimson rounded shapes with dark blue inner forms and thin coloured lines looping across them — *Slanty Chunk* (2017–22)

Partition: a wide image divided into vertical bands and rectangles of violet, pink, olive and grey with thin black dividers — *Partition* (2019)

Unheard Estimator: translucent rounded forms in yellow, blue, violet and grey with small black blots and thin lines — *Unheard Estimator* (2019)

Hands is the "Invitation image of my first solo exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery London, 2012", that is About (→ About (2012), Sculpture and the Object): two open hands, one laid over the other, seen through a red vignette; three editions, minted in 2022. Rug (2009) is from the Diagonal Enlargements: "A found image (60×96 pixels) of a rug, enlarged factor 6 with my self-invented diagonal enlarger algorithm, then enlarged 4 times with a regular nearest neighbour enlarger."

Four tokens carry little or no text. Slanty Chunk gives only "Harm van den Dorpel, 2017 - 2022, PNG RGB 8 bit, 3000 × 3000 px": overlapping red rounded shapes with dark blue inner forms, crossed by thin looping lines in yellow, green and grey. Its dates are those of Shunned Mass, which the token text places in Algues Artificielles (→ Algues Artificielles), and its forms look like that series; the token does not name one. Partition (2019; token) divides a wide format into vertical bands and nested rectangles of violet, pink, olive and grey, ruled by thin black lines. Unheard Estimator (2019, as its work page has it, minted in 2021, "Edition AP 2 / 1 + 2 AP"; token) stacks translucent rounded forms in yellow, blue, violet and grey, dotted with small black blots.

Most of these are older pictures minted in 2021–23, the moment the artist describes in Tokenizing Sustainability, when "old, and newer, artworks that never found their ways to art collectors" suddenly fitted "the editioning, format, and price range of NFTs" (→ Tokenising Sustainability).

Single Specimens

Single Specimens has 27 tokens: "Manual mints from the massive genealogy of the 'Death Imitates Language' project, containing the first 12.000 specimen, bred by a genetic algorithm, and selected by micro-feedback of the artist." Each token links its specimen's page on the project's website, deathimitateslanguage.harmvandendorpel.com, and is described as "Specimen from the Death Imitates Language series, 2016-2022". Twenty-six were minted independently; Hatter Epot Xgeubke, also a work on harm.work, was offered with Upstream Gallery. The series is set out on Death Imitates Language.

The names are the lineage

The Death Imitates Language page reads each three-part name as the specimen's own name followed by its two parents'. The website confirms it. The page of Carrot Wowan Yuryalai lists, under "Parents", Wowan and Yuryalai, and nine siblings. Following the parent links shows that the collection contains a family.

Lumber Zaoarsnc Samsneed: a large curling hook in olive and teal around a pale oval, with black dots — *Lumber Zaoarsnc Samsneed*

Ferenc Hornybit Lumber: the same curling hook and pale oval in pink, orange and violet, inside a black frame — *Ferenc Hornybit Lumber*

Zatlas Socialist Zaharovaliisa: a magenta and red gradient with a white calligraphic stroke and dot — *Zatlas Socialist Zaharovaliisa*

Lumber Zaoarsnc Samsneed (token 58) is the parent "Lumber" of Ferenc Hornybit Lumber (token 18). The inheritance is visible: both are built on a large curling hook that wraps a pale oval, with a ring at the right; the child has kept the shape and changed its colours, from olive and teal to pink, orange and violet, and added a black frame. Ferenc in turn is a parent, with Zatlas Socialist Zaharovaliisa (token 19), of Big Pablo Ferenc Zatlas, the specimen printed in 2021 on perforated paper. Three generations of one line are thus split between a collection of tokens and a print.

Vfhufhbnrf Resskill Yelalaoui: green and grey blobs on a beige ground crossed by two thin diagonal lines, with dotted spirals — *Vfhufhbnrf Resskill Yelalaoui*

Derryck Resskill Yelalaoui: dark green and grey blobs and a bright green shape on a pale ground crossed by thin diagonal lines — *Derryck Resskill Yelalaoui*

Vfhufhbnrf Resskill Yelalaoui and Derryck Resskill Yelalaoui are siblings: the website gives both the same two parents and the same birth date, 20 April 2016, in the project's first weeks. Both lay grey and green blobs over a pale paper-like ground crossed by thin diagonal lines, with small dotted spirals; the second has darker blobs and a bright green one. Other names point outside the collection. Zeddybear Zcuviey Dayssuck shares its parents' names with the frozen work Vuwtvvyft Zcuviey Dayssuck, and Wehrxbym Pipikaka Yozdczmi with the 2017 wall object Vvgdamn Pipikaka Yozdczmi.

In a genetic algorithm the work is the population and its history, and a single image is one moment of it. Single Specimens sells moments one at a time, and the names keep each one attached to the others.

Monaco Mix

Monaco Mix is "a full screen software piece, infinitely reconstructing the temporal development of a selection of touchpad drawings", with "25 drawings by Rita Vitorelli" and "concept and programming by Harm van den Dorpel", 2016. harm.work records its two registrations: "This artwork was initially deployed on the bitcoin blockchain using the service Ascribe in 2016. The Ethereum NFT version was programmed and deployed in 2018. A maximum of 100 tokens could be minted." All 100 were issued, through left gallery, and each token adds: "The artists retain all copyrights of the assets referenced by this NFT."

The 2018 date places the collection in the move van den Dorpel describes in Tokenizing Sustainability: after ascribe stopped its service, "in 2018, I bit the bullet, deployed an ERC721 smart contract and minted Ethereum tokens for the editions that had been sold", so that "some editions were now tokenized on two blockchains at once" (→ left gallery). Monaco Mix is such a case, registered on Bitcoin in 2016 and on Ethereum in 2018.

Each token carries one trait, "drawing", a short code, and links to the piece on left gallery's first site with that code appended. The 100 tokens point to 29 distinct drawings, more than the 25 the work text names. Token 6 shows a scribbled face in black and green with red hatching, a small pink flower and a hand at the left; token 99 a spotted animal in ochre among plants, with blue and green strokes.

Monaco Mix #99: a spotted ochre animal among plants drawn in black line, with blue and green strokes — *Monaco Mix #99* (2016/2018), drawing by Rita Vitorelli

The software replays the drawings as they were made, stroke by stroke and at the speed of the finger, overlapping in time. Six years later van den Dorpel reused it with his own drawings after Léger for Fernand (2022). Both works are discussed under the recorded gesture on Meditative Labour; Phantom Crush (2023) is a later case of another artist's drawings put through his program (→ Phantom Crush).

Sources

Sources (2026) has five tokens. Its text: "The vector source files behind my pen-plotted drawings. Each SVG is a score: instructions handed to a mechanical plotter, which interprets and performs them in ink on paper. What the machine produces might differ from what the file describes. Stored permanently on Arweave, bundled with the plotted drawing."

The five are the files of five plotter drawings from Stained Unravel: Chroma Husk, Hatched Lining, Sealed Solids, Stitched Gaze and Archive Static. The first four were shown in Senescenence (Nguyen Wahed, New York, 2026), and their tokens are listed as offered through Nguyen Wahed and Interface Gallery; Archive Static was minted independently (→ Senescenence, Stained Unravel).

Sealed Solids, source file: a grid of triangles and half-cells hatched in red, brown, pink, orange, violet, green, blue, grey and black — *Sealed Solids* (2026), SVG source

Archive Static, source file: dense zigzag hatching in dark maroon with stripes and loops of pink and grey — *Archive Static* (2026), SVG source

The files show how a plotter drawing is written. Every shape is a set of stroked lines and nothing is filled, since a pen can only draw lines; the automaton's triangles, half-cells and quarter-arcs are each a patch of close parallel hatching. Each stroke colour is one pen. The Sealed Solids file uses nine: black, grey, dark green, blue, brown, violet, pink, orange and red. Archive Static uses five, black, a near-black red, grey, magenta and crimson, and reads as a field of dark zigzag hatching broken by pink and grey stripes and loops. The files run from 3 to 21 megabytes of line coordinates.

The text's "score" is the term of the Venster writing (2024), where the code stored on-chain is the score and each browser's rendering a performance of it (→ Mediation and the Archive). In Venster the performances are many and change with every screen. Here there is one performance, the drawing in ink, made once by a machine that may depart from the file, and the token keeps the score beside it. The collector of the drawing receives both, and can compare what the file describes with what the plotter did.