Openness — Release Early, Release Often

Release early, release often — installation view, Abrons Arts Center 2013 — *Release early, release often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity* (2013) — installation view, Abrons Arts Center, New York

The source: Raymond on Torvalds

The phrase comes from Eric S. Raymond's essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (1997), where it describes how Linus Torvalds ran the development of Linux: "Linus Torvalds's style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise." Raymond sets that "bazaar" against the "cathedral" model, in which software is built by a small group in private and released when finished, and draws lessons from it, among them "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers." His explanation of why the bazaar works is the number of people looking: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

The 2013 press release names no author. It calls the title "a credo of computer programmers in the open source movement" that "encourages frequent release in order to keep a rapid, close feedback loop operating between the system user and developer. Blurring distinctions between the software's users and its creators, this strategy allows for transparency and heightened physical and conceptual accessibility, two concepts the artist values in his approach to artistic practice." Raymond was not a new source for him: the 2011 Strategies text already takes several rules verbatim from Raymond's writing (→ Strategies (2011)).

The Abrons exhibition (2013)

The phrase was the title of van den Dorpel's first solo exhibition in the United States, at Abrons Arts Center, New York, from 19 April to 7 June 2013, curated by Karen Archey (press release). It brought together spherical Perspex sculptures, collages and web-based works, "installed associatively rather than by medium or chronology"; his draft checklist for the show is note 1035.

Abrons Arts Center gallery with a hanging sphere of printed transparent strips, framed collages on two walls and a CRT monitor on a plinth — *Release early, release often…* (2013) — installation view, Abrons Arts Center, New York

A sphere of printed transparent strips hangs in the middle of the room; on the walls are a small framed collage, a pencil drawing of hands on grey linen, a collage around a printed face and a large panel of layered transparent sheets; a CRT monitor stands on a plinth at the right.

The press release gives recursion as the curatorial premise and follows one drawing of a hand from DeviantArt into a collage, the lead image of the 2012 About show in London, reviews of that show, and finally a screenshot of a review printed on a Plexi strip of a new sculpture. The full chain is on the exhibition summary.

Dissociations.com as data-mining tool

The press release presents dissociations.com as a tool through which the artist "data mine[s]" his own activity "by applying generative algorithms on intuitive formations of aesthetic theory." In the wiki's reading this is the feedback loop turned inward: the artist is developer and user of the same system, and the associations it proposes between his notes are ones he did not plan.

Agent's reading: recursion through the outside

Thesis. Note 876 defines recursion as closure: "The prerequisite of recursion — the demand for self referentiality — immediately also forbids reference to anything outside of itself," and recursion "is exclusive and aggressively jealous." Read that way, "release early" is its opposite, and earlier versions of this page left the two as unresolved opposing pressures.

Antithesis. The press release puts the open-source title and the recursion premise on the same show without any tension between them. The works, it says, "wax upon the notion of recursion and literally recur themselves, aesthetically, materially, and conceptually, through both physical and virtual domains", and the recursion it describes runs through the public: the drawing comes back by way of a press image and a critic's review.

Synthesis. The loop is closed in form and open in material. What recurs in the work is whatever the world sends back, so release is how the loop closes, not an interruption of it. The same structure is 992's "The Work = The Work + Its Documentation": the record of the work's release becomes part of the work.

The collector's dog

When a collector asked for a new version of one of the Perspex works, van den Dorpel offered instead to make a sculpture "out of reconfigured Facebook photos of the collector's dog", which the press release reads as "toying with conventional notions of the historical artist-patron relationship." The checklist lists it as Assemblage (Portrait of Collector's Dog) (2013), a work in progress (1035).

"Putting some thoughts and ideas there" (2015)

Two years later, in the chat that Jaakko Pallasvuo used as the press release for Just-in-Time (American Medium, 2015; full text), van den Dorpel introduces a Hannah Arendt quote, "Men always want to be influential… No, I want to understand. If others understand in the same way I've understood that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like being among equals", and continues:

i think thats the point of doing it
putting some thoughts and ideas there, and then see what other people think about that
thats the thrill
in this quote of hers, im not on the side of the 'men'

The Abrons press release describes the loop as a structure; here he names the wish behind it. The same chat records his doubt about making anything at all: "i just in general feel incapable of expressing in art pieces the stuff that really interests me", and, a few lines later, "the incentives to actually make something are unclear to me - because they are so wound up in other processes. like market stuff, and who's going to see it anyway." The Just-in-Time summary has the rest of the exchange.