The Markov's Dream Palette — A Lineage

When he made Markov's Window in 2004, van den Dorpel "hand picked a simple colour palette, based on pure, fully saturated RGB colours" (→ 3002):

• Blue: rgb(0, 0, 255)
• Green: rgb(0, 255, 0)
• Magenta / fuchsia: rgb(255, 0, 255)
• Black to white gradient: rgb(0, 0, 0) to rgb(255, 255, 255)

Every channel is either off or at full strength. Blue and green are two of the three additive primaries; magenta is red and blue together. The three colours are corners of the RGB cube, and the gradient runs along its grey diagonal from black to white.

In 3002 the artist offers a reading of the choice, hedged as hindsight: "Looking back - perhaps it's a stretch - I now think that the blue reminds me of a test screen, the green is very much 'not printed matter' because in print green can only be constructed by mixing cyan, yellow and kali, which always makes it darker than what a screen can produce, and the magenta, on the contrary, is actually part of the CMYK gamut. The black to white gradient is so very easily rendered on a digital screen, but it needs dithering in printed matter." He concludes that the palette is "very digital - aware of how it can and cannot be represented in printed matter".

Markov's Window (2004)

The square is turned on its point and split into large grey gradient fields. Near its left edge the subdivision goes deeper, into small squares of magenta, blue and green, a few with a gradient square turned 45° inside them. In the program a single square fills the screen, and "This square can split into multiple segments, it might change its colour, or it might rotate 45°. Each of these changes in appearance have a particular chance of happening, purely based on their current state" (harm.work). The recorded version is shown turned on its point, as the screen is hung.

In the Markov's Dream about text the artist dates the work to "this period of transitioning between studying computer science and art", when he made "Macromedia Flash animations such as 'Markov's Window' (2004)". harm.work files it as the one work of the series Window and Dream, "Series of generative animations based on (deterministic) chance, of which some (fully) on-chain". The animation was dismissed "at both uni and art school", and he forgot about it until "it found a place in a group exhibition at Upstream Gallery in 2018". He posted on are.na on 2 June 2018: "Markov's Window, 2004 - 2018. Part of group show opening tomorrow at @upstreamgallery" (block). His caption for a photograph of that installation reads "2004 - 2018 / generative software / loop, not interactive, silent" (block). A year after the original, note 1035 lists "UNTITLED (DUTCH FRACTAL), 2005, computer animation (infinite)": its image is a turned square subdivided in the same blue, green, magenta and grey gradients.

A Stedelijk curator saw the work at Upstream and "decided to purchase and permanently install it alongside original work by Piet Mondriaan and Kazimir Malevich" (about text). It went on view on 22 September 2020 in Stedelijk Base, the museum's collection display, as a "transhistorical intervention" near the sections on Bauhaus, Mondriaan and the Russian avant-garde (harm.work; the acquisition and the hang are gathered on Stedelijk Base). In the photograph the monitor hangs on its point on a grey wall. Around the corner are paintings by Malevich, among them a red cross on white and a black bar across a red one, under a hanging string construction. The artist's own caption names "works by Kazemir Malevich".

His text sets the work against that room by method, not by colour: "Whereas Constructivists and Suprematists might have made many studies and versions to reach a single 'best possible' composition, this work instead embraces perpetual change." The colours do not come from that room either. Green and magenta at full screen intensity are not pigment colours; by the artist's own reading in 3002, the green cannot be printed at all.

Markov's Dream (2022)

A large rounded square shaded from white to black contains three rounded bars, each with smaller rounded rectangles in green, magenta, blue, black and white. harm.work describes token #1 as "A remake of the 2004 work Markov's Window, with identical palette", and token #12, Markov's Dream (IV), as a remake "with altered palette". The collection is "32 tokens, gradually released over time, of which the last one is still to be released", each one "animated, coloured, and nested". The collection page calls it "A window into aesthetic memories". In 2022 the tokens were shown on square screens in Screens and Skin (Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich) and Systems of Belief (HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Graz) (→ Screens and Skin, Systems of Belief).

The squares became rounded. The about text explains why: as operating systems "became more graphically oriented", "UX designers gradually began to give all square-shaped user interface elements (e.g. windows, buttons, input fields) rounded edges, shadows, and gradient colours", and "The pure Platonic forms of 'Markov's Window' have been replaced by impure circles or rounded squares in the dream space" (→ The Squircle).

The dream also left the screen without its colours. For the Serpentine's Future Art Ecosystems Vol. 3 (2022), a print and web publication on art and decentralised technology made with Eva Jäger and Victoria Ivanova, he made "several monochrome images based on Markov's Dream screen captures, pulled through a custom rasterizing algorithm" (Future Art Ecosystems Vol. 3, harm.work). Two that the publication did not use became prints, each in an edition of three plus an artist's proof: Molly Blob 1 (90 × 67.5 cm) and Molly Blob 2 (80 × 80 cm).

Nested rounded squares survive only at the top left of Molly Blob 1. The rest is one large tilted oval of overlapping rounded forms, which the rasterizer has broken into grain, smears and streaks of black, white and grey.

Molly Blob 2 keeps more of its source. Inside a round-bottomed grey field, nine rounded cells sit in a three-by-three grid; each contains smaller rounded forms, which contain smaller ones again, and thin curved lines run across them all. The rasterizer has turned the gradients into a fine grain, but the nesting stays legible across the whole square.

Markov's Window 2023 (token #30)

harm.work calls token #30 an "Enhanced 2023 remake of the classic 2004 Flash version". Its traits give the colours as "extended classic", the fill as "solid & gradients" and the maximum nesting depth as 7. The image shows the turned square on a white ground, subdivided much further than in the 2004 recording. Blue dominates, many cells run from blue or magenta to white, and a tall green triangle with a black-to-white neighbour crosses the lower half.

Venster (2024)

Venster, "A new version of Markov's Window from 2004, but now fully on-chain" (harm.work), has several palettes. Tokens #0, #3, #4 and #5 carry the palette trait "dream", and the on-chain SVG of #0 declares green, blue, magenta, black and grey together with red and orange: the 2004 colours with two added (→ The Lozenge).

Stained Unravel (Markov's Dream) (2026)

A grey-violet field of small cells, threaded with magenta and blue, is crossed from upper left to lower right by a band of bright green. A patch of white stripes sits in the upper right corner.

In Stained Unravel each colour is a pair, and a cell moves from the start colour toward the end colour the longer it keeps its shape (→ 3000). The preset named after the palette keeps the four colours but takes them off the corners of the cube. Green runs from rgb(20, 255, 20) to rgb(0, 240, 0), magenta from rgb(255, 50, 255) to rgb(233, 0, 233), blue from rgb(22, 22, 255) to rgb(0, 0, 233), black ages toward dark grey and white toward light grey, all on a mid-grey ground (sources/stained-unravel-palettes.json). Each staining stays within its hue. When a group of cells takes a new colour, the displayed colour eases toward it over under two seconds, so changes between the four colours show as short fades. The palette that kept only extremes in 2004 here has its extremes slightly softened, and it records how long a cell has been still.

Entfaltung (⟡) (2026)

The sixth return is a token of Entfaltung, the series after Emma Kunz (→ Entfaltung on Chain). On 25 October 2026 the artist asked for presets based on Markov's Window, with one condition: "the colour palette should be #ff00ff #0000ff #00ff00 #ffffff #000000 and a black to white gradient — only use these." One of the four drafts, edited by him, became token 24, Entfaltung (⟡): 24 points in octant symmetry, white faces shaded through grey into the dark ground, and magenta, blue, green and black in the projection slivers where faces overlap. It draws no lines.

Here the palette meets the block hash. Markov's Window drew a recursive grid whose next state depended on the present one only, the property Markov named. Entfaltung takes each new shape from one block hash and moves its points from the old positions to the new. The points and their connections never change, "only their positions move" (harm.work). The structure and the palette are what carry over from one block to the next, and the palette also carries over from 2004.

Palette as memory

The about text opens with Markov. A Markov process "examines the state of a system at a given time and attempts to project the next state of that system based on existing relationships", ignoring every earlier state, so that such processes "are often described as 'memoryless'". Then: "Human beings are different. … Human beings are creatures of memory, creatures of language." Of Markov's Dream he writes that it "is a kind of culmination of long-standing previous states of mind and life. In that way, perhaps it is not strictly 'Markovian'", and that "Markov's process, thus, will become a window into memories, aesthetic memories and personal ones".

Markov's Window and the cellular automaton run as chains of states, each drawn from the one before; Entfaltung draws each shape from a block hash. The palette is what passes from one work to the next, outside any of these processes. In 3002 the artist says only that he has "since returned to this palette in multiple more recent works". The returns are not identical: one token keeps it exactly, others alter it, the cellular automaton softens it, Venster extends it. A palette made of corners of the RGB cube survives these changes because it is so easy to name. Four values written in 2004 could be typed into a Solidity contract in 2024 and into a language-model prompt in 2026.

See also

• Colour — the palette as one of five ways colour is made in the practice; colour as chord
• Stained Unravel — the cellular automaton and its seven palettes
• The Lozenge — Markov's Window turned on its point; Venster
• The Squircle — the rounded forms of Markov's Dream
• Entfaltung on Chain — the tokens, including ⟡
• Protocol, Taste, and Systems — Markov's Window and the memoryless system
• Memories and Memorylessness: Markov's Window / Markov's Dream — the artist's text (2022)