Meditative Labour — Hand, Plotter, Code, Prompt

In the order they were made, four drawings move from the hand alone to the hand working on what a plotter has drawn. Kapitulation (2024) is a pencil drawing made entirely by hand. In Beads, Beads II and Beads III (2025) the plotter draws the outlines and the artist fills the cells by hand, in coloured pencil for the first two and in graphite for the third.

Kapitulation was shown in Angles Morts (LOHAUS SOMINSKY, Munich, 2024), his two-person show with Vera Molnár, among plotter drawings and generative animations. The three Beads were shown together in Cloud Writings (2026), his first solo exhibition at Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, Tokyo. The exhibition text is where he names the hand-colouring: "some drawings I made partially by hand, which was a rich and meditative commitment for me."

The three Beads hang side by side, from left to right Beads II, Beads and Beads III: the polychrome sheet in the middle, the red-and-graphite one and the graphite one on either side.

The four drawings

Kapitulation (2024)

A square pencil drawing on a grid of small triangles that join into chevrons and right-angled meanders, each shape hatched in graphite at varying pressure. No plotter touched it. The geometry looks like the one the Anni program generates, and The Grid lists Kapitulation under the Anni cell: the hand carries out the rule the program also runs. The title is German for capitulation; its reading in the exhibition is on Angles Morts.

Beads (2025)

harm.work describes it as a "hand-coloured plotter drawing, based on the work Anni". The plotter draws a lattice of triangles and diamonds from the Anni program, whose animations began from Anni Albers's Study for Camino Real (1967) (→ The Grid). The artist then fills each cell in coloured pencil: peach, coral red, cobalt blue, dark brown and black, with a few yellow cells. The harm.work caption adds that "bead" derives from Old English gebed, "prayer"; counting beads and filling cells are both done one unit at a time.

Beads II (2025)

Another output of the same program, with more zigzags than diamonds. The palette narrows to graphite and black with coral red and a paler pink, which run in horizontal bands, so that whole rows read like the stripes of a woven sample.

Beads III (2025)

According to the artist, Beads III is plotted from the same vector file as Beads II, with one change before plotting: the corners are rounded by the program, so every angle becomes an arc and every zigzag an S-curve. The topology stays the same; only the curvature changes. The fill is graphite alone, from near-white to dense charcoal, the range of Kapitulation. The artist describes the rounding as a search for an organic dimension. Since the vertices stay where they were and only one parameter, the corner radius, changes, the step from II to III is a move along what he calls a continuum between the geometric and the organic, not a break with the grid (→ Randomness and Pattern, under Organic and geometric, which also covers his are.na channel Organic Software Forms and Field). Earlier organic forms in the practice are the bred seaweed shapes of Algues Artificielles (from 2016) and the botanical plotter drawings of 2017 (below).

Four ways of working, hand and machine

The four drawings sample a wider set. Across the practice the hand and the plotter, or the hand and the program, have worked together in four ways:

The hand interrupting the plotter

harm.work calls Papaver Somniferum an "occasionally manually interrupted plotter drawing". Like the other botanical sheets of 2017, it is traced from a 3D plant model, often an open-source asset made for games (→ Early Plotter Drawings): the leaves are a blue ballpoint wireframe, the stems dense black, with short yellow and orange segments. In the artist's account he stops the plotter to change pen colour and also draws into the sheet; of Thistle (left) he writes, "Alongside the plotted line I also drew some parts and lines by hand." Untitled Flower belongs to harm.work's Automated Drawings series; Papaver Somniferum is listed under no series.

Machine, then hand, before the Beads

His are.na captions date the hand-filled plot years before the Beads. In May 2018 he posted Don't eat the yellow snow to his Drawings channel as "2016 / semi automatic drawing (cnc + hand) / pen and pencil on paper" (block); harm.work lists it as Yellow Snow (2017). Untitled Nested Composition 1 is captioned "2018 / 27 × 35 cm / hand coloured plotter drawing on paper" (block), and coloured pencil fills some of its plotted rectangles, rhombi and circles. In December 2018 he posted an A2 sheet in progress with the note "ik kleur nog delen in met de hand", "I am still colouring parts in by hand" (block). Typographic Trace (2022) is a "plotter drawing on Hahnemühle paper, with manual colour pencil retouches". In June 2025, the year of the Beads, he opened the channel Hand Coloured Plotter Drawings for Quadra and Alithea, each captioned "Plotter drawing on paper with pencil hand drawing. Composition generated with the Mutant Garden algorithm." (1, 2).

The Entfaltung drawings of 2026 continue this mode. There the artist reports the fill as full of decisions: "how to shade, where slivers should appear, what overlaps what, and in which colours" (→ Entfaltung on Paper).

The recorded gesture

A fourth kind of hand-work runs alongside the others: drawing on a laptop touchpad, with the finger's path and its speed recorded and replayed by software. In Fernand (2022), harm.work lists "Twenty-five drawings, each based on a work by Fernand Léger, drawn with a laptop touchpad", replayed "overlapping in time, in ever changing order". The artist says the work was commissioned for the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. The frame shows black curving contours over flat, overlapping fields of violet, green, pink and yellow. Like the Beads for Albers, Fernand runs an early-modernist artist's work through a program of the artist's own.

The software of Fernand comes from Monaco Mix (2016, issued as NFTs in 2018), a full-screen piece made with Rita Vitorelli. There the touchpad drawings were hers and van den Dorpel programmed the playback, so the hand and the program came from two people. In the frame, overlapping line drawings in black, brown and two blues cross each other: a horse-like head at the right, a feathered wing in the middle. Six years later he reused the engine with his own drawings and Léger as the source.

In this mode time is most literally part of the content: the replay returns the finger's seconds in their order and at their speed.

Time as content: weaving and code

Weaving is the inherited reference for grid work in this practice. The Angles Morts exhibition text argues a continuity from textile craft through grid-based art to generative practice, and gives it as the reason so many of the artists in that line are women (→ Angles Morts; the loom genealogy is on Senescenence and The Grid). A woven cloth records the hours that made it, pick by pick, and cannot be made faster than the loom moves. Generative art is often read as the medium that cuts that link: a program computes a field of cells in seconds. Filling the plotted cells by hand puts the time back into the surface, visible in the changes of pressure and in the pencil's small drift inside each outline.

The artists he works after in these years made their rule-based work in the 1950s and 1960s: Albers's Study for Camino Real (1967) for Anni, Vera Molnár's Quatre éléments distribués au hasard (1959) for Pression des pairs, Charlotte Posenenske for Rasterbild. Filling the Anni grid by hand re-runs something of how such work was made, cell by cell, which is the thesis's test for taking up older procedures without formal nostalgia (→ Does a Work Still Need to Be New?, Re-running a procedure).

Programming was a loom of its own. The April 2026 draft text on Stained Unravel says that "for most of computing's history, writing code was a solitary and manual act, as repetitive and meditative as weaving" (draft). The artist has programmed since he was about thirteen, and in his 2026 statement drawing and programming "have served me in the same ways: as a refuge, as a place to be absorbed, as a way to hand over control, and as freedom." Since he began programming with a language model, during Stained Unravel (→ Does a Work Still Need to Be New?), an afternoon of typing has become a paragraph of prompt, and the labour that counts in the code is more and more the judging of what the model returns (→ Process Legibility, The criterion vs. the code).

Agent's reading: the hand inside the loop

Thesis. An earlier version of this page read the hand-fill as compensation: as prompting thinned the typed labour of code, the hand-filled cell kept a slow labour the prompt cannot reach, "one of the things that still takes as long as it takes".

Antithesis. The dates and the artist say otherwise. He was filling plotted drawings by hand in 2018, years before language models. His 2026 statement says the renewed drawing "does not feel like a departure from the work I made by programming", and describes a loop: "The code informed the drawings, and the drawings informed the code." He says of the Entfaltung drawings that they "were necessary for me to understand the algorithm better" (→ Does a Work Still Need to Be New?).

Synthesis. The hand-fill is the slowest step inside the feedback loop, not a refuge from the machine. What takes as long as it takes is the judging: at the pencil, each sliver or cell is a decision about shade, overlap and colour, made at the speed of the hand, and what is learned there goes back into the next version of the code. The same reading, criterion at the speed of the hand, is on Entfaltung on Paper.

The spinner — time that cannot be suspended

The text for Field ✲ (2008/2023) addresses the time of labour from the other side, through the interface's own sign for waiting:

"Spinners are shown when UX designers want to make clear that you need to wait for something. I came to realise in particular now in my early 40s, that one cannot suspend being. The separation between productive time, and time supposedly 'on hold' is entirely based on my own perception and interpretation. I am free."

Field began as a Flash work in 2008 and was rebuilt in 2023 as six fully on-chain tokens, each a grid of animated loading spinners (→ Field; its organic reading is on Randomness and Pattern). The compensation story above carried a ranking of time: full hand-time against the thin time of waiting for the plotter or the model. Field denies the ranking. If the split between productive time and time on hold is a matter of perception, there is no thin time for the hand-fill to be rescued from.

Agent's reading: undivided time

The bead already joins the two positions. Counting beads, gebed, is neither production nor waiting, and the same is true of the filled cell: it is done when it is done, nothing is waited for and nothing is produced ahead of schedule. Field reaches that freedom from the other side, by looking at the sign for waiting until, gridded, it turns like flowers. What the hand-fill keeps is time not yet split into the productive and the on-hold. The hand keeps it by being occupied; Field keeps it by dissolving the split in perception. Both refuse the spinner's message that being can be put on hold.

See also

• Angles Morts (2024) — Kapitulation; the weaving lineage in the exhibition text
• Cloud Writings (2026) — Beads I–III as exhibited; "a rich and meditative commitment for me"
• Entfaltung on Paper — plotted constructions filled by hand; the fill as a run of decisions
• Early Plotter Drawings — the 2017–18 sheets in the artist's words; the interrupted plotter
• Randomness and Pattern — the organic/geometric continuum; the Organic Software Forms channel; Field
• Process Legibility — the criterion vs. the code
• Senescenence — the loom genealogy
• Field (2008/2023) — the spinner grid and "one cannot suspend being"
• Does a Work Still Need to Be New? — re-running a procedure; the drawings and the algorithm