Randomness and Pattern

The dialectic (805)

Note 805 opens with a proposition from N. Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman):

"We might regard patterning or predictability as the very essence and raison d'être of communication — communication is the creation of redundancy or patterning. If information is pattern, then noninformation should be the absence of pattern, that is, randomness."

So information and randomness are defined against each other — neither is prior, each constitutes the other. The dialectic is not resolved in favor of pattern (communication, meaning) but held open: "this pattern/randomness dialectic does not erase the material world."

The key claim: the apparent erasure of material infrastructure by information is an illusion that should be the subject of inquiry, not a presupposition. Information technologies create "flickering signifiers" — unstable, prone to unexpected metamorphosis — but they do not float free of their material substrate.

A strange interpolation in the same note — "When I laid there beside you, could you feel me there? My arms were wrapped around you, and I was stroking your neck" — inserts the intimate and bodily into the theoretical text. This is itself an act of disrupting the pattern of theoretical discourse with something apparently off-register.

The workmanship of uncertainty (609)

Note 609 ("Undo") applies the randomness/pattern dialectic to craft and skill:

"The workmanship of certainty is static, whereas the workmanship of uncertainty is most likely to generate innovation. Like any form of evolution, craft can only advance through mutation. Risk provokes an evolutionary mutation through the necessitated gesture of reconciliation of accident."

And: "In order for something to be truly innovative it must be the result of an evolutionary process: one that results from aberration, mutation and adaptability."

The contrast: workmanship of certainty = you know what you'll get before you make it (static, non-generative). Workmanship of uncertainty = the outcome is not predetermined; accident is encountered and reconciled. This is not chaos — it requires commitment: "Where there is no risk and every commitment can be revoked without consequences, choice becomes arbitrary and meaningless."

The title "Undo" (the ubiquitous Ctrl+Z) frames the opposite of this — the safety net that removes commitment from action.

The artist's position (709)

The artist statement 709 formulates the practice as the balance point in this dialectic:

"The most valuable moments emerge when the coincidental and the intuitive balance the rational — an irrationality without being esoteric."

Not randomness without structure, not structure without randomness. The feedback loop ("every single parameter depends on all the others, and my interference amplifies as a feedback loop") is itself a pattern that generates unpredictable outputs. Complexity and contradiction "do not necessarily call for a solution."

Cloud On Title (846)

The work Cloud On Title (extended version) takes its title from a legal term: a "cloud on title" is a claim, encumbrance, or defect in the chain of ownership records. It introduces doubt about who holds clear title to a property. As a title for an artwork, it introduces the same doubt about the artwork's status — its ownership, its clarity, its unencumbered transmission. Uncertainty as the subject matter of the work, not a deficiency to be remedied.

Chance as method (878)

Note 878 (mise en abyme): "Prints of cell phone photo of white cube gallery floor, arranged according to the Laws of Chance, then aligned." The sequence is significant — first arranged by chance, then corrected toward regularity. The Laws of Chance (Arp, Dada) produce an initial state; alignment then intervenes. Note 856 observes: "The relatively ordered appearance suggests, however, that the artist did not fully relinquish artistic control." Both statements are true simultaneously.

The limit of pure randomness (Spike #70)

In conversation with Tina Rivers Ryan (Spike #70), van den Dorpel identifies the experiential failure of random-number-based generative art: "it's always different. But it's also always the same, in a way, and after a while you get bored, as there's no direction or growth." Pure randomness produces variation without accumulation — no telos, no memory of the path taken.

The resolution is the fitness function: a criterion that gives the selection pressure direction. Without it, randomness and pattern alternate aimlessly. With it, the dialectic becomes evolutionary — each iteration contends with the last, and the system develops. This connects the randomness/pattern dialectic to taste as the through-line: a fitness function is formalised taste.

Connection

The pattern/randomness dialectic runs across all these notes. It is not resolved — the work occupies the productive tension between them. Pure randomness is meaningless (no communication); pure pattern is dead (no mutation). The practice lives in the unstable middle, where accident is "reconciled" but not eliminated, where the coincidental "balances" the rational.

Pleasure and the workmanship of uncertainty (Struggle for Pleasure, 2024)

The Struggle for Pleasure press release (Verse SOLOS London, 2024) adds a new stake to the randomness/pattern dialectic: pleasure. The question is not just what the dialectic produces formally but what it makes possible experientially. Van den Dorpel distinguishes lasting pleasure (which requires the workmanship of uncertainty — openness, resistance, incompleteness) from easy pleasure (nostalgia, recognition, generational positioning).

"This openness to uncertainty and to the dialogic process of the realisation of a work is central to the struggle for pleasure. It is my uncertainty, but it appeals to a wider openness, an openness where pleasure can flourish."

Nostalgia (8-bit graphics, CryptoPunks) produces immediate pleasure by short-circuiting the dialectic — recognition replaces construction. The workmanship of uncertainty produces a different kind of pleasure, harder to achieve and more durable: "knowledge itself breaks down" as the condition under which something opens.

Vera Molnár's imperfections and the deliberate error (Angles Morts, 2024)

The Angles Morts exhibition (LOHAUS SOMINSKY, 2024) adds two instances of the randomness/pattern dialectic at the level of material production.

Molnár's constrained imperfections. Early computer art — specifically Vera Molnár's work — used "very limited" technology "with no screens" that "provided only simple outputs that she had to manually translate into physical objects." The translation "resulted in small imperfections, which Van den Dorpel particularly appreciates." These imperfections are not random in the probabilistic sense — they are the mark of the labour of translation between computational instruction and physical object. The gap between the algorithm's precision and the material result introduced the human hand. Van den Dorpel values this gap not as deficiency but as evidence: the imperfection is where the person appeared.

Embroidery's kept-down pen. The work Embroidery (2024) was produced by deliberately departing from normal plotter behavior: keeping the pen down during moves between drawing positions. This generates "threads" — stray marks tracing the pen's path between intended drawing locations. The "error" is not accidental but chosen; it reveals the transition paths that are normally invisible (pen lifted, no mark). The threads are the paths the algorithm took between points: the implementation made legible as image.

The two cases are structurally opposite: Molnár's imperfections were imposed by material constraint and retrospectively valued; Embroidery's threads were introduced by deliberate rule-violation and generatively valued. In both, the deviation from smooth, invisible execution is the content. Randomness here is neither noise nor method but the trace of a path taken — the record of how the mark got from one place to another.

Compression and decompression — a directional account (Our Inner Child, 2023)

The Our Inner Child exhibition text (Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, 2023) gives the pattern/randomness dialectic an art-historical directionality by framing the generative practice as the inverse of Mondrian:

"Painters such as Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg would look at, for example, a tree and take the enormous amount of complexity they would perceive and reduce it to a few shapes or lines to convey its essence. You could think of this as a kind of compression which perhaps reaches its highest level in Mondrian's grid-like canvases. I thought about what could happen if you moved in the opposite direction, taking something very basic, and applying the capacities of generative art to that form. In that way it becomes a process of decompression, you can move from very simple geometrical shapes to extreme complexities, moving from shapes to the level of pixels."

The compression/decompression frame gives the dialectic a history. Mondrian's De Stijl grid is not simply a formal choice — it is the endpoint of a reductive process: perceptual complexity → geometric essence. The grid is maximally compressed: the minimum of formal means required to carry the essential structure.

Generative art runs the reverse. The input is minimal (simple geometry, basic rules); the output is extreme complexity at the pixel level. The Resolution Paintings embody this — the medium (photographic exposure on metallic paper, up to 150×150cm) is chosen specifically because it carries the decompressed output at full resolution. As van den Dorpel notes: "any kind of screen display reduces visual complexity, therefore the only way these works could truly convey their full complexity was to produce them as material objects." The screen reimports a compression the algorithm had removed. The print does not.

This connects the pattern/randomness dialectic to the question of medium. The algorithm decompresses from pattern (simple rules) toward material richness; the screen re-compresses; the print preserves the full decompression. Medium is not neutral in this framework — each display layer is a compression decision, and the work's complexity is determined not just by the algorithm but by the chain of compressions applied to its output.

Compare: Mondrian compresses in the direction of increasing pattern (the grid is maximum pattern, minimum randomness). Generative art decompresses in the direction of increasing material complexity — not randomness exactly, but the full texture of what the rules produce when allowed to run at full resolution. The dialectic is not abandoned but reconfigured: the question is not just pattern-or-randomness but at what resolution the pattern is allowed to unfold.