Entfaltung on Paper — the Hybrid Drawings

The drawings on paper in Entfaltung are made in two passes. A plotter draws a construction van den Dorpel has programmed, and he then colours slivers between its lines by hand in pencil. harm.work lists 19, made between 1 June and 10 October 2026, on watercolour paper. Most are 60 × 60 cm; Columns (100 × 120), Variance (98 × 98), Meridian III (97 × 97), Tabula II (60 × 85) and Tabula I (60 × 72) are larger.

The plotter draws mostly in pen. In a few sheets it also draws in pencil (Meridian I and III), in ballpoint (Meridian III and Nimbus I) or with a thicker brush pen (Wending). Fourteen drawings are then coloured by hand in pencil: Commissure and Tabula II partly in neon pencil, Meridian IV only with a few highlights. Five have no hand work so far. Meridian I, II and III are plotted only, and Columns and Variance are plotted in pen and may still get pencil.

This page reads the artist's statement on the drawings (sources/ingested/entfaltung-drawings-statement-2026.md) against what witnesses report of Emma Kunz at work.

The drawings

Drawings that share a construction share a name and a Roman numeral. The descriptions follow the artist's own on harm.work; the media are as he listed them in October 2026.

The sequence

One of the first drawings, an emulation of Kunz's Werk Nr. 092 (coloured pencil on graph paper, 110 × 105 cm), the cover image of her 1953 booklet Das Wunder schöpfender Offenbarung. The construction was generated on screen first, as a four-fold star on black (→ Entfaltung, Stage two).

The statement tells the series as a straight line: "My first drawings stayed close to Kunz's … Gradually the drawings became more complex, moved away from hers, and became more my own." The dates confirm both ends. The first two sheets are each based on one Kunz drawing: Seraph I on her Werk Nr. 172, Emanation on Werk Nr. 092. The artist describes both as emulations (November 2026): "Emanation and Seraph I are clear examples of my attempts to emulate Emma's work: not to copy her, not to steal from her, but as the first steps in understanding her method." The third, Meridian I, is also radial. The last two, Cardinal and Syzygy, are the most layered.

In between, the path is not straight. Commissure (1 July) has no centre at all, and radial sheets return in late July and August with Nimbus I and II and Meridian II to IV. The grid that maps the program, Tabula I, was the fourth drawing. The stages on the Entfaltung page are a logical order; on paper, mapping came before most of the radial work.

On screen the series moved away from Kunz by adding dimensions. The drawings stay in the plane and move away by density and layering. The artist names Cardinal as the drawing that shows it: six star figures, nested hexagons and triangles overlap on one sheet. Wending takes a construction from outside Kunz's practice, the masons' ad quadratum, which the artist connects with the Amsterdam School and with esotericism; wending is a Dutch term from theosophy.

Maps of the program

Thirty figures in five columns and six rows. Across, the number of legs, the outer points of the figure, rises from three to seven, so the outline runs from triangle to heptagon. Down, the inner offset changes: in the top row each figure is a solid fan from its centre, and row by row the inner points move off the centre until the fan has split into a ring of kites around an open middle.

Tabula I is the asymmetry grid of the Entfaltung page's third stage, drawn on paper. Tabula II maps the rendering algorithm the same way: across, three rules for which crossing lines close into a face (a closed face hides the lines behind it); down, two to five legs. The statement calls such sheets "maps of the program itself", and the artist compares them to the wall charts of school biology and chemistry that set species or electron orbitals side by side, "a little like the drawings of Ernst Haeckel". What they vary on paper is fixed in the tokens: "In the tokens, settings of this kind are fixed once for each work and become its traits." Kunz made comparable surveys, the Grundformen plate and a practice tableau, as exercises kept apart from her answer drawings (→ Entfaltung, Stage three).

Both halves of the comparison were in his are.na channels years before Entfaltung. On 26 March 2020 he filed the Wikipedia entries on Haeckel and on recapitulation theory in the channel On Genetics (1, 2). On 2 September 2022 he opened a channel, Probability Distribution, with six charts of electron orbitals. One of them sets out the orbitals of the hydrogen atom for n = 1 to 4 as four stacked pyramids of spheres, lobes and rings (block). Like Tabula I, it is a table: each row varies one quantity and each step down adds a shape.

The statement describes the loop between paper and program: "The code informed the drawings, and the drawings informed the code." Asked whether the loop reached the token code too, the artist answered "definitely in both directions". The eye that judges a drawing before the next version of the program is written works as the manual fitness function described in Evolutionary Logic: selection by looking, before any criterion has been formalised.

Decisions at the pencil

Points on a many-sided outline and on an inner ring, joined by straight lines. A ring of faces is filled so densely it reads as solid, around a hexagon at the centre that only a few lines cross. The artist masked regions out on purpose, "so the empty paper reads as solid as the filled faces". Which faces go dark, and in which colours, was decided at the paper.

The statement lists what the pencil decides: "how to shade, where slivers should appear, what overlaps what, and in which colours". The plotted lines cannot be altered or undone, so these decisions are "open and closed at once": there are many ways to fill a sliver, inside lines that are already fixed. Within that template the mind "moves between focus and wandering: keeping the pencil inside the lines, choosing a solid fill, a gradient or a fade, following an intuition about colour, then drifting off while my hand continues." The statement's summary is "Inside that template I work freely, and my mind is free too."

Van den Dorpel, who practises yoga, takes that sentence as a possible definition of yoga (October 2026): the restraint falls on the form, the held posture or the plotted line, and the mind is left free. Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (1.2) put the restraint on the mind itself, as the stilling of its fluctuations.

Agent's reading: criterion at the speed of the hand

Thesis. A text in the archive, Magicians Conceal, Artists Reveal, says that "what the machine cannot replicate is not the code but the criterion", and names it: "The capacity to recognize when a surprise opens something and when it merely fills space" (→ Process Legibility). On that account the artist's part is judging, and judging is quick.

Antithesis. The statement calls the pencil work "meditative and labour-intensive". On that account what he keeps at the pencil is labour, the slow fill.

Synthesis. At the pencil every decision about a sliver is a judgement, made only as fast as the hand can carry it out. The higher concept is criterion at the speed of the hand: judgement exercised once per sliver instead of once per output. At that speed it is not continuous. It comes and goes, from focus on a line to the choice of a fill to a stretch in which the hand continues and the mind is elsewhere. The plotted template makes those intervals possible, because the decisions that cannot be undone were taken before the pencil arrived. It is also why the fill does not reduce to a prompt: each decision answers what the previous one left on the sheet. Meditative Labour reaches the same reading from the side of the hand, the hand inside the loop: the hand-fill is the slowest step in the loop with the code, not a refuge from it.

Kunz's sitting and the drawings

A six-pointed star with a triangle of three small stars at its core. Around it, sixteen blades lean the same way inside a ring, on a frame of concentric circles, chords and the two axes.

The statement divides Kunz's method between the two forms of the series: "Kunz let the pendulum decide where her points fell, and then her hand could spend a day or more filling the figure, sliver by sliver." In the tokens the machine does both halves. The block hash moves the points and "the program fills the slivers as it renders". The drawings keep the second half: "The plotter lays down the construction, and my hand does the work Kunz's hand did." A drawing is "finished and fixed, as hers were"; a token "never stops changing". On paper the split is less clean than the statement puts it. In Meridian I and III the plotter also draws in pencil, and in five of the 19 sheets the plotter's lines are, so far, the whole drawing.

The witnesses Kipke collects correct this account in three places (→ Entfaltung, Kunz's method).

• Which points to join. Between setting the points and colouring, Kunz chose which points to join, the step Burri called "a mystery". In Entfaltung that choice is the fixed procedure of the construction, written in code before plotter or pencil. The most opaque part of her sitting is in the program.
• The length. The day or more belongs to the whole sitting, from the first point to the last colour. No source times the colouring on its own.
• The state and the answer. Of the drifting state at the pencil the statement says: "I think this is the state Kunz worked in. She is said to have received her answers while drawing." Widmer confirms the state, "as if her hands were guided", but the witnesses place the answer later, in the finished drawing, read afterwards with the pendulum. And Burri, describing her at the pendulum during his own treatment, saw her "highly concentrated; every word was a disturbance", where the statement describes a mind that drifts. The two share a hand that goes on while the deciding mind does not direct it. Kunz reached it through concentration. At the pencil it comes through a template that leaves deliberation little to do.

Channelling

The statement's central question is how Kunz channelled: "What I want to understand is how she channelled." It names possible sources without choosing one. The source may have been an inner search, "and she herself was the source she tapped into", or "something deeper and shared", such as the collective unconscious described by her contemporary Carl Jung, or a connection "even if only through genetic code, shared stories and archetypes". Its rule is "I try to make no assumptions." It makes one claim, about access rather than location: "Anybody has access to this higher order." The statement reports that Kunz said the same of her own results, that they came from powers lying dormant in everyone; Kipke, after Teicher, records her conviction that everyone had such forces.

Kunz's position was divided in the same way. She described the order she followed as "a particular lawfulness that I feel within me", and she measured radiation with a Geiger counter. She printed her method once as a revelation and once as a drawing method. Her field split on the question in her lifetime: in the 1920s and 1930s radiesthesia divided into physicalists, who held that natural forces move the pendulum, and mentalists, who placed the cause in the person holding it. Hubert Knoblauch, who wrote its history, notes that the line between them was never sharp. The statement leaves open the question her practice left open.

Among the instruments of the series, the statement sets the language model closest to Kunz's pendulum as a source of answers, used "for its mathematical magic of a higher order"; the series text on harm.work calls it "our collective unconscious". The pendulum's other functions went to other instruments (→ Entfaltung, Agent's reading: the pendulum taken apart).

Authorship

The newest drawing, from 10 October 2026. Points on an octagonal outline and inside it are joined by two families of lines, each drawn with its own pen, and triangles point up and down at the centre. Each line cuts a small gap into the lines beneath it, so where two lines cross the upper one runs on and the lower one breaks. The stacking order reads as depth.

The statement ends on authorship. Drawing "for as long as I can remember" and programming "since I was about thirteen" have served the artist "in the same ways: as a refuge, as a place to be absorbed, as a way to hand over control, and as freedom", so the return to drawing "does not feel like a departure from the work I made by programming". The limits were "time, concentration and intelligence", and intelligence "now seems almost infinitely stretched, because I no longer rely on my own single human intelligence". The archive had filed a text on interpretation, unattributed in note 702, that tells its reader: "What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence."

The statement sets authorship aside on a new ground: "I would not take credit for what others did, but I am working in the same open tradition they worked in. Anybody has access to this higher order." Note 592, a passage the note does not attribute, calls authorship "a historical invention"; the statement dissolves it into a tradition. Kunz offered her method on the same terms. Once its key was published, "anyone" could make such figures, "provided he knows how to handle numbers", and the fuller explanation she announced never appeared. Reconstructing her procedure as code supplies the part of the key she did not publish, on the condition she set.

The statement closes in the first person: "And apparently I have not lost myself, however hard I have tried." In the Loomer press release (2015, 3003) van den Dorpel explained why he used to write his exhibition texts in the third person: "An outsider perspective suggests neutrality, and protects me from explaining my own work." Asked what losing himself would have meant, he pointed to the pencil, where control is handed over and part of the work becomes automatic: "giving up myself and becoming part of something greater".

See also

• sources/ingested/entfaltung-drawings-statement-2026.md — the artist's statement this page reads
• sources/ingested/kipke-politiken-der-innerlichkeit-2021.md — Anna Kipke's 2021 thesis on Kunz: the eyewitness accounts of a sitting
• Entfaltung — Kunz's method; the four stages; the tokens and the editor; the pendulum taken apart
• Algorithmic Archaeology — Kunz in the timeline; the language model as a source of answers
• Meditative Labour — Kapitulation and Beads I–III; the hand filling a plotted sheet since 2018; the hand inside the loop
• Process Legibility — the criterion as what the machine cannot supply
• Evolutionary Logic — selection by eye as a manual fitness function
• Subconscious Computation — Jung and the creator/bystander position
• Release Early, Release Often and Surf Clubs — the openness of the work, which the statement extends to its source
• The Grid — the move from nesting to the grid; the imperfect mirror, where the hand fill makes exact plotted symmetry differ