Quadra, Features and Soft Shield (2025) — Garden Compositions on Paper

Three works of 2025 take compositions from the Mutant Garden algorithm onto paper. Quadra and Features are plotter drawings with pencil added by hand; harm.work gives each the same note, "Composition generated with the Mutant Garden algorithm." Soft Shield is a photographic exposure: "A protoseeder ie. created with the Mutant Garden algorithm. The original output was generated in 2023." harm.work lists Quadra and Features in no series and Soft Shield in the series Proto Seeders, the physical works made from early outputs of the algorithm.

The algorithm

Mutant Garden (2019–; → Mutant Garden) runs on Cartesian genetic programming, a method Julian F. Miller and Peter Thomson developed from 1997, which encodes a program as a grid of nodes. In the series text the artist explains that "clicking one rectangular 'mutant' will cause its siblings to be replaced with newly mutated offspring", so that one parent is chosen at a time (→ Evolutionary Logic). Its outputs are nested: rectangles inside rectangles inside a rounded square, a tree drawn as a picture (→ The Grid, Nesting in the earlier work; The Squircle). The Protoseeders are "Curated early outputs of the Mutant Garden algorithm", issued as tokens.

From 2020 to 2022 the outputs went onto paper mostly as prints and exposures on metallic paper, such as Blush Array II and Modular Mind (→ Context Switch). The first plotter drawing filed under the series is Typographic Trace (2022), which harm.work lists in both Mutant Garden and Automated Drawings: a plotted drawing on Hahnemühle paper "with manual colour pencil retouches" (→ Automated Drawings). Quadra and Features continue that combination at a larger size.

Quadra (2025)

Quadra is square and split into four quadrants, which the title names. Each quadrant is divided into rectangles, and some of these are divided again: the upper-left quadrant contains four small panels that repeat the layout of a quadrant at a smaller scale. Inside the rectangles are rounded slots, rows of small circles and squares, bars like sliders. Large circles in blue and violet pen run across the divisions. By hand, in coloured pencil, the artist shaded a crescent inside some circles, red, yellow, blue or green, on one side only, so that the flat circles read as spheres lit from one direction.

He filed it on 26 June 2025, with its harm.work caption, in a new are.na channel, Hand Coloured Plotter Drawings (block).

Features (2025)

Features is the denser of the two. The field is split into two columns, and in each the plotter has drawn lattices of small square cells in black, some cells filled so that they read as dark blocks, gathered in clusters down the sheet like lines of characters on a page. Rectangles in violet and orange outline groups of clusters, and ovals and circles run behind them. The ground is covered with fine horizontal lines in pink and orange, so the paper reads as tinted. A close photograph in the same are.na channel, its filename dated 11 June 2025, appears to show this drawing and the hand's part in it: ovals shaded in pale orange and yellow pencil, a few cells filled in blue (block).

On the same day as Quadra he filed a harm.work page titled Alithea, 69 × 82 cm, with the same caption, "Plotter drawing on paper with pencil hand drawing. Composition generated with the Mutant Garden algorithm." (block). Alithea was the work's first title: it was renamed Features (the artist, November 2026), and the Alithea page no longer exists.

Soft Shield (2025)

Soft Shield is a Protoseeder of 2023, issued as token 91 of the Protoseeders collection under the same name, Soft Shield, and exposed onto paper two years later. The upper half has three rows of three rounded panels, each filled with small nested modules; in the first two rows the outer panels repeat each other with small changes. Below, a large grey field with rounded lower corners, the outline of a shield, carries bigger overlapping rectangles and slots. The exposure renders the composition with soft edges and translucent overlaps, and the shield shape fades into the white of the frame. The title seems to name that outline; the artist has not said so.

Hand, plotter and garden

The three works show the same compositional system in two physical forms. In the exposure the image is transferred whole, as light. In the drawings the plotter rebuilds it line by line and the hand then decides what to shade and fill, which is the mode Meditative Labour calls machine, then hand, from Untitled Nested Composition 1 (2018) to the Beads drawings of 2025. In June 2025 he named that mode in the title of the are.na channel he opened for Quadra and Alithea. A year later the Entfaltung drawings (2026) follow the same order of work.