Predecessors of Entfaltung

Entfaltung did not arrive from nothing. Its machinery comes from earlier works in Harm van den Dorpel's practice, each of which solved one part of the problem the new series brings together. The most direct predecessor is Quantizer.

Quantizer (2025)

Quantizer is a collection of 256 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, shown with Verse SOLOS in 2025. It is where the mechanism at the heart of Entfaltung was first built.

Each Quantizer token receives a fixed grammar of shapes and rules at mint. From there the image is generated live: every Ethereum block, about once every twelve seconds, the latest block hash is read as a seed and a new composition is drawn from the grammar. The work is fully on-chain and has no memory. Each frame is determined only by the current block hash and the token's grammar, and nothing is carried forward. Because the block hash is the same for everyone, all collectors see the same composition at the same moment, anywhere in the world. A Quantizer can be collected but not frozen.

Entfaltung inherits this whole apparatus: the grammar fixed at mint, the block hash as the recurring seed, the twelve-second cadence, the determinism, the worldwide synchronisation, and the refusal to settle on a final image.

What Entfaltung changes is the transition, more than what the block hash acts on. Like a Quantizer composition, each Entfaltung shape is drawn from one block hash alone, with no memory of the shape before: every fourth block, the hash seeds new positions for the token's points. Quantizer replaces one picture with the next. Entfaltung keeps the number of points and the symmetry group, gives each new point the identity of an old one, and moves every point in a straight line over ten seconds. In the three blocks between, the figure turns from one symmetric view to the next. Every point is joined to every other, so no move breaks a connection (→ Entfaltung on Chain). The synchronisation widens too. Quantizer shows every collector the same composition; two Entfaltung tokens with the same symmetry and point count show the same structure at the same moment.

Anicca (2025)

Quantizer had a predecessor of its own. Anicca (2025) is the first algorithmic mandala in the practice. It builds its symmetrical compositions through a Markov chain: each part is chosen conditionally on the part above it, descending through an inheritance graph. Its Pali title names the absence of permanence, and the work is about exactly that. Anicca states impermanence in Buddhist vocabulary; Quantizer went on to enact it through blockchain time. Entfaltung carries the same commitment: a work that is collectible but never fixed, always mid-change.

Manfred Mohr, an external precedent

Outside van den Dorpel's own work, the closest precedent is Manfred Mohr, who from the 1970s worked with the n-dimensional hypercube. Mohr takes one rigid object with a fixed set of vertices and edges, rotates it in four, five or six dimensions, and projects the result to the plane. All the variety in the image comes from rotation and projection, while the object never changes.

Entfaltung shares that invariant: a fixed set of points and connections producing an endless run of different figures. It parts from Mohr on where the change happens. Mohr's object is rigid and only its orientation moves. In Entfaltung the points themselves move, and the object genuinely deforms. Where Mohr held to the monochrome line, Entfaltung carries Emma Kunz's colour and sliver-fill onto the moving faces.

What Entfaltung adds

Each predecessor contributes one piece. Anicca brought the mandala and the acceptance of impermanence. Quantizer built the on-chain engine that re-seeds from every block. Mohr showed how one fixed structure can yield endless images. Entfaltung joins them and adds the move none of them made: raising the drawing into three dimensions and carrying one set of points, each joined to every other, from one block's shape to the next.