Impulse, Risk, and Method

The deepest impulse (793)

Note 793 argues against making rational control the ideal of human agency:

"I would suggest to find your deepest impulse, and follow that. The notion that there is something that is one's deepest impulse, that there is a discovery to be made here, rather than a decision; and the notion that one trusts what is so discovered, although unclear where it will lead — these, rather, are the point. The combination — discovery, trust, and risk — are central to my sort of outlook, as of course they are to the state of being in love."

The move from decision to discovery is crucial. A decision operates on known options and applies a criterion. A discovery is what happens when you follow something whose destination is not known. This is not irrationalism — the note explicitly accepts that rational control is "a basic condition of growing up" — but it refuses to make that control into an ideal. An ideal of rational control "rules out a priori most forms of spontaneity. And this seems to be absurd."

Being in love appears here not as a metaphor but as a model: discovery, trust, and risk are the structure of love, and they are also the structure of the practice.

The biographical face of the deepest impulse

The exhibition text for Our Inner Child (Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, 2023) gives 793's "deepest impulse" a biographical address. Where 793 argues philosophically that "there is something that is one's deepest impulse, that there is a discovery to be made here, rather than a decision," Our Inner Child names what that impulse actually is: "the feelings that first inspired me to make images."

Van den Dorpel describes years of "highly theoretical and technologically sophisticated approaches" that yielded interesting aesthetic results but at the cost of "obscuring a part of myself." The cerebral apparatus — the very thing that grounds the conceptual rigour of the practice — had been functioning as a buffer against the feelings that preceded it. Inner Child therapy led him back to those feelings: the insecurity about visceral pleasure (the worry that a colourful composition that "immediately appealed" was intellectually insufficient) was identified and released.

The shift this describes — from intellectual buttressing to embracing the visceral — is not the abandonment of rigour. It is the biographical enactment of 793's distinction between decision and discovery. The theoretical approach decides: it applies criteria, builds structures, produces outcomes. The visceral impulse discovers: it finds something whose destination was not known. The Resolution Paintings are the result of following the discovery rather than the decision.

Reverse engineering Anni Albers (Angles Morts, 2024)

The Angles Morts exhibition catalogue provides the most concrete biographical instance of the reverse-engineering move described in 709. Van den Dorpel attempted to computationally replicate Anni Albers' triangle patterns — "technically easy to programme an algorithm that replicated her triangle patterns." The first attempt: place triangles randomly.

It failed. The random version did not achieve the aesthetic effect of Albers' work.

The inference: "Van den Dorpel realised that Albers must have formulated clear rules in her head, which she applied algorithmically to each cell of the grid." The aesthetic failure of random replication became a diagnostic tool — it proved the presence of implicit structure that the random approach could not reconstruct. Albers' work was already algorithmic; the rules were invisible because they were never written as code, only embodied as procedural knowledge applied by hand.

This is the reverse-engineering move made literal: not starting from the system to understand its output, but starting from the output to deduce the system. The desired result (Albers' aesthetic) could not be achieved without reconstructing the rules; the reconstruction required first experiencing the failure of the rule-less attempt. Discovery, not decision — and it arrived through failure.

Reverse engineering and the feedback loop (709)

The artist statement 709 translates this into a description of method:

"In order to gain deeper insights into the inner workings and logic of a system we are required to disassemble it, to break it down into parts and to apply reverse engineering. This is not a reactionary, but a progressive attitude."

Reverse engineering moves backward from effect to cause — it follows the impulse of the artifact rather than designing forward from intention. The system then becomes a feedback loop: "Every single parameter depends on all the others, and my interference amplifies as a feedback loop."

The key resolution: "Complexity, inconsistency and contradiction do not necessarily call for a solution." This is a philosophical stance, not just a working preference. The equation with too many variables is not a deficiency — it's the condition of interesting work.

The approach personal-to-universal is also stated here: "Try to connect the personal with the universal; approach the general by being subjective." This is the epistemological method implicit in 793's deepest impulse — the subjective is not opposed to the universal but the route to it.

Risk and commitment (609)

Note 609 ("Undo") grounds the role of risk in learning and craft:

"There is no way to gain wisdom but by making risky commitments and thereby experiencing both failure and success."

And the negative formulation: "Where there is no risk and every commitment can be revoked without consequences, choice becomes arbitrary and meaningless." The title — Undo — is the name of the safety net that defeats this: the ability to undo removes the commitment that makes a choice meaningful.

The evolutionary model follows: innovation requires aberration, mutation, adaptability. The "workmanship of uncertainty" is not carelessness but a structural openness to accident. Craft advances through mutation, not refinement alone.

Navigation as method (952)

Note 952 ("Script") offers a complementary formulation of the same position at the level of ontology:

"The destination emerges from our move. It wasn't there before and we weren't there (…) and upon arrival its novelty fades immediately."

Method here is not a plan applied to a known terrain — it is navigation that produces the terrain as it moves. The arrival immediately begins to lose its novelty: the discovered becomes the familiar, which prompts the next move. This resonates with 793's "discovery, trust, and risk" — the cycle of impulse, discovery, and the fading of arrival is the rhythm of the practice.

"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Chroma Husk — Stained Unravel — *Chroma Husk* (2026) — *Stained Unravel*; the cellular automaton as feedback loop: each state folds back into the next

In his interview with CGP inventor Julian F. Miller, van den Dorpel frames his creative process via Beckett: "I personally experience the most creative magic in this feedback loop of trying and failing." Miller confirms the same structure in scientific discovery: CGP's non-coding genes were "originally there purely because it made it easier for me to write the program. I only discovered the extreme importance of non-coding genes for evolution later on." An accidental feature of implementation becomes a central discovery.

Both interlocutors locate creativity in the same structure 793 describes: discovery rather than decision, with the destination emerging from the move rather than being specified in advance. The unexpected result of a failed attempt becomes the premise of the next iteration. Risk is not the obstacle to knowledge — it is the mechanism.