Protocol, Taste, and Systems

Primary source: Brian Droitcour, "Beautiful Rules", Outland, 25 November 2025 (text). Droitcour, the director of Outland, had moderated van den Dorpel's 2021 conversation with Jenna Sutela for the same publication (→ Harm van den Dorpel & Jenna Sutela).

What protocol art is

Droitcour calls protocol art "a useful, if still unsettled, term for describing the work of artists who don't just make images but devise systems that govern how images appear, circulate, and take on meaning." Mat Dryhurst, he notes, "has described this mode as operating 'upstream of media.'" The difficulty is that such art is "hard to appreciate on the terms of art. Images are still objects of desire." Van den Dorpel is "an unusually clarifying figure here because his work transcends the split… His work fuses protocols with form."

Droitcour frames the whole practice as one inquiry: "If his long artistic project has been to understand taste—personal, collective, then systemic—Quantizer returns that inquiry to the level of protocol."

Personal taste: Dissociations

"For several years, the website Dissociations served simultaneously as his online portfolio and a durational artwork through which he trained an algorithm to understand his taste. It would select three elements—images or texts—to populate a page, and van den Dorpel would then eliminate the least coherent item in the trio, teaching the site to display a shifting map of his preferences."

The site's own text adds the step Droitcour leaves out: from the eliminations "the mathematical inverse was calculated, which would supposedly reveal unconsciously the most interesting and relevant associations" (about text). Taste entered as rejection and came back as association (→ About, Subconscious Computation).

Breeding taste: the genetic-algorithm works

In Death Imitates Language (2016), Droitcour writes, a population of "software organisms" mutated "by means of subjective selection by the artist": he decided which should live, which die and which procreate, and some of the "frozen" forms were fabricated as objects. In Spike #70 the artist describes how the selection criterion, the fitness function, moved from his own judgment to the public's in Hybrid Vigor (2017), to difference from all other specimens in Nested Exchange (2017), and to a formal measure in Mutant Garden (→ Evolutionary Logic, where the progression is tabulated). Droitcour does not discuss the fitness functions.

Juancar Zolim Juancar fixes one specimen as an object: a translucent disc with dark spots on a square panel.

Two Nested Exchange specimens from one population, both built of grey rounded columns; the "hipster algorithm", as he calls it, scored each by how different it was from the rest.

Collective taste

The token shop (2018). The same populations were sold through a protocol of his own. At tokens.harmvandendorpel.com, works from Nested Exchange ("Tree shaped chromosomes ledger exchange") and Death Imitates Language ("Linear chromosome cross-over population") were offered as Ethereum tokens, "restricted to 128" and "grouped according to their species". A "Set Token" corresponded to a chosen artwork; a "Wildcard Token" "holds the potential to be connected to an artwork in the future": "Within wildcard tokens there is no information stored yet about an artwork. [...] Once the metadata field of a wildcard token is set to a particular artwork, the wildcard token transforms into a set token." Binding was "a one-time-only transaction and cannot be reversed", and "This mechanism allows for speculation and supports the development of new works and species" (site text as archived on 13 December 2019). The collector's choice was written into the token three years before Mutant Garden Seeder. An explainer video for the tokens was part of E-State Realisms at ArtCenter/South Florida (now Oolite Arts), Miami Beach, in 2018 (block 2368362).

Delinear.info (2014). Droitcour: "Instead of a linear feed with stable connections between users and their posts, the site presented a drifting assemblage of images and text, whose associative links were both structure and content. When users were online, their avatars hovered as circles over the page… While the big platforms were honing their recommendation engines and training users to desire algorithmic predictability, Delinear.info proposed an interface for collaborative collage, where associations remained unstable and expressive." It builds note 952 into a platform: "Every node has character, partially (but maybe completely) defined by it's associations. Identity is deferred."

The detail shows kanban columns with cloud and circle magnets, a red square, a faint face and the handwritten word "pressure". Time Management, Aureool and Oyster (all scrum kanban) were shown in Just-in-Time (American Medium, Brooklyn, 2015), whose press release by Jaakko Pallasvuo reads the show as being about "programmer workflows and how they are visualized in corporate environments" (→ Just-in-Time).

Mutant Garden Seeder (2021). "Collectors were invited to join the selective process, minting only certain notable mutations. In theory this decentralized authorship; in practice, collectors caught up in the speculative froth of the NFT market at the time bypassed the interface to mint directly from the contract—a reminder that protocols can be gamed as easily as images can be circulated" (Droitcour).

The screenshot shows the Seeder site: a grid of specimens with names (Annlli, Ann-ra, Annella…) and their mutation counts. The protocol also works against the market. Outland's introduction to the 2021 conversation calls it a project "in which on-chain algorithms model genetic mutations that evolve with each transfer"; the artist's own words there: "NFTs are supposed to be fixed when you buy them, but mine evolve all the time. One might change from a beautiful intricate composition to a gray rectangle, and that impacts its market value" (source; → Sutela conversation).

Systemic taste: Quantizer

The token sets a diamond in a square, with a cross of nested framed squares at the centre and dithered gradients of yellow, teal and magenta. Droitcour on Quantizer (2025): "its codebase is too large to be fully on-chain. It lives as a single web page that can be collected but not fixed." It recomposes itself through dithering algorithms of the 1980s and '90s; "It invites long looking precisely because it frustrates the desire for return. In response to NFT culture's obsession with permanent ownership and endlessly replayable imagery, Quantizer insists on the permanence of change." And: "It makes the underlying rules perceptible as aesthetic material. In doing so, it resolves the tension at the heart of protocol art. The project asks us to judge protocols the way we judge artworks: as expressive, contingent, shaped by decisions and values" (→ Quantizer).

The permanence-of-change reading has a precedent. Nora Enning's essay for Context Switch (Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin, 2022), his two-person show with Achraf Touloub, says the changes in colour and structure of his works "make unchanging observation impossible simply by their design" (→ Context Switch).

Markov's Window and the DSM trait

The monitor hangs on its point at the left; on the walls behind are Suprematist paintings of black and red squares. Droitcour describes Markov's Window as "round and angular forms recomposed via Markov chains, mathematical models where the next step of a sequence is determined by the current step and not what came before it" (→ The Lozenge). Its NFT iteration Markov's Dream (2022) exposed its traits, but "van den Dorpel also inserted his taste for melancholia into the system, keeping the metadata poetic as well as forensic. A trait of Markov's Dream labeled 'DSM book covers' imbues iterations with colors and vocabulary from the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders" (the essay's spelling; → Markov's Dream Palette).

Diagnostics carries the trait: rectangles of teal, red and brown with words such as "your eyes", "before", "prolonged" and "subside". The wiki reads the combination through Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), where melancholia is grief that cannot let go of its object: in a chain that by definition keeps no memory of earlier states, the melancholy has no remembered loss to attach to.

The blockchain soul (2021)

Droitcour's closing claim, that the work makes protocols into things one might desire, has a first-person precedent. In Tokenising Sustainability (2021) van den Dorpel describes the 2020 rebuild of left gallery, the online gallery for downloadable editions he ran with Paloma Rodríguez Carrington (2015–2022): "As only a few buyers in the previous years had shown interest in owning an NFT for their purchase, I hesitated to implement an integration with the Ethereum blockchain again", so ownership records moved to a regular database (source). After the 2018 integration, transaction fees had come to exceed "the sales price of the actual artworks by orders of magnitude." Then:

"I was proud of what we had achieved with the left gallery relaunch, and I was amazed by all the works that artists offered on it, but also it hurt, because left gallery had lost some of its "blockchain soul"."

The wiki reads this as attachment to a protocol rather than to its outputs: the gallery kept selling, and what was lost was a record of ownership its operator could not change. In the months of the rebuild he was designing a registry whose provenance anyone could read in an ordinary browser (→ left.gallery, Tokenising Sustainability). Together with the Seeder story, the essay shows a protocol gamed by its users and given up by its designer for lack of takers.

Making protocols desirable

Droitcour ends: van den Dorpel "is earnestly building the systems he wants to exist… He doesn't just make protocols. He makes protocols visible, turning the logics of digital systems into things you can look at, and maybe even desire." Earlier protocols, he writes, made "room for difference, variation, and choice as alternatives to feeds that tell us what to consume," from "the conviction that people should be able to shape their own online environments rather than live inside whatever enclosure the platforms provide." Note 709, the artist statement, has the matching line: "Complexity, inconsistency and contradiction do not necessarily call for a solution."

See also

• Subconscious Computation — generation delegated, selection kept
• Evolutionary Logic — the fitness functions in full
• Quantizer — the work itself
• left.gallery — the registry and the lost blockchain soul
• Tokenising Sustainability (2021) — the essay in context
• Harm van den Dorpel & Jenna Sutela (2021) — Droitcour's earlier conversation
• Assemblage Identity — identity as a history of selections