Senescenence

Solo exhibition presented by Interface Gallery together with Nguyen Wahed, 504 E 12th Street, New York, 3 April – 2 May 2026. Source: Senescenence press release.

The exhibition showed the seven tokens of Stained Unravel (Spring, Game, Night, De Stijl, Stained, Markov's Dream, Mother of Pearl), generative animations of a cellular automaton, together with four plotter drawings of 2026: Hatched Lining, Stitched Gaze, Chroma Husk and Sealed Solids (harm.work). In the press release's words, the drawings trace "the same generative logic into an anachronistic register". A plotter can only draw lines, so the drawings need their own algorithms to turn the automaton's cells into hatching. The rules themselves are documented on Stained Unravel.

View through the gallery window: title lettering, a framed drawing and a leaning screen — *Senescenence*, installation view, Nguyen Wahed, New York, 2026

Seen through the street window, the lettering on the glass reads "Senescenence / Harm van den Dorpel / April 3 – May 2, 2026 / Presented in collaboration with Interface Gallery". Behind it hang a framed plotter drawing and, leaning against the brick wall, a portrait screen showing a red, yellow and blue state of the automaton.

*Hatched Lining* (2026), plotter drawing

Stained Unravel, a still of white and grey triangle cells on a grey ground — *Stained Unravel* (2026), still

The still shows the automaton's vocabulary at small scale: white triangles and half-cells on a grey ground, merging into diagonal bands, with a few coloured cells along the lower edge.

The title

The press release calls the title "an intentional recursive misspelling of 'senescence', the term for the gradual aging or deterioration of living systems, often associated with the browning of fallen leaves." The added syllable makes the word age as it is written. This ties the title to the self-reference that runs through the archive (→ 876; 992: "The Work = The Work + Its Documentation"; Recursion).

Death as the system's feature

The cellular automaton is one "in the tradition of Conway's Game of Life, where a minimal set of rules gives rise to extraordinary complexity, and where death is not failure but the system's natural feature" (press release). In John Conway's Game of Life, cells die by rule, and the dying clears space for new patterns. The same thought, applied to the breeding systems of Death Imitates Language and to the "fossils" of Mutant Garden, is on Evolutionary Logic.

3000 gives the difference from Conway in three points. Conway counts living neighbours regardless of where they are; Stained Unravel "compares neighbours on exact positions with multiple masks", a "bitmap" compare. Each cell counts the iterations since it last changed, and its colour moves from a start to an end colour while it stays the same. Cells whose edges touch merge into one shape with one colour. 3001 lists the shapes a cell can take: 23 kinds, numbered 0 to 22, from the empty cell (kind 0, "all four points collapsed to the center — invisible") through full squares, diamonds, corner, centre-point and flat triangles to half rectangles.

The press release puts Stained Unravel "in the tradition of Conway's Game of Life"; 3000 calls it "a profoundly more complex version of it, and finally a diversion". Because a rule can output the empty shape (kind 0), death stays in the rules as one of the twenty-three shapes; that reading is set out on Stained Unravel (under Agent's reading: death as one shape among 23).

The loom, the pixel, the GPU

The press release places the works in a research line "from the binary logic of the weaving loom, to early two-dimensional pixel graphics, to the contemporary GPU, where millions of cells can live, die, and transform simultaneously in real time. At each technological threshold, the capacity for complexity expands beyond full human control." Its visual references are "Anni Albers' textiles, Buddhist mandalas, and stained-glass windows", "rule-based systems in which local decisions accumulate into forms that exceed their individual construction."

The comparison between loom and automaton is the wiki's analogy, not a technical identity. A Jacquard loom (1804) reads a punched row that lifts some warp threads and not others; Stained Unravel compares each cell's neighbours with masks. What the two share is a grid of local binary decisions. The exhibition itself carries the textile reference in the drawing titles: a hatched lining, a stitched gaze.

Gallery with two large leaning screens and three framed drawings on a white brick wall — *Senescenence*, installation view, Nguyen Wahed, New York, 2026

The two forms of the work in one room: two portrait screens leaning against the walls run Stained Unravel, one in fine diagonal bands of colour, one in pale pinks and greys; three framed plotter drawings hang on the walls, one between the screens and two on the brick wall to the right.

The Anni works, named after Anni Albers and shown in Cloud Writings in Tokyo in 2026, take the textile line further back: Anni (2024) builds its image "from top left to bottom right in reference to the process of weaving"; Anni (unravel) (2025) starts elsewhere; Anni (sync) (2026) runs the same work on one to six screens at increasing resolution (harm.work). How the rule, once set, comes to run without the hand is argued on Algorithmic Archaeology and The Grid.

Anni (sync) on four screens — *Anni (sync)* (2026), four-screen installation

The press release also speaks of "sacred geometry": "geometry is not merely descriptive but generative. Within traditions of sacred geometry, structure and spirit are intertwined rather than opposed." That thread, with the artist's own use of the term for his Emma Kunz research, is collected on Sacred Geometry; the heraldic reading of the Tokyo drawings is on Cloud Writings.

"Less composed than initiated"

"Van den Dorpel approaches the algorithm with this mindset, not simply as a tool of expression, but as a system set into motion to allow unforeseen forms to emerge beyond the artist's direct control. The works are less composed than initiated; what appears on screen is not fully designed, but permitted."

Initiated means the rules are set going; permitted means the artist lets the results stand. The archive has earlier versions of the stance. 709, his artist statement: "Complexity, inconsistency and contradiction do not necessarily call for a solution." 609 contrasts "the workmanship of certainty", which "is static", with "the workmanship of uncertainty", which "is most likely to generate innovation" (a variation on David Pye's "workmanship of certainty" and "workmanship of risk" in The Nature and Art of Workmanship, 1968, which the note doesn't name). 793 adapts a passage from Bernard Williams's Morality (1972), itself quoting D. H. Lawrence: "find your deepest impulse, and follow that", with "the notion that one trusts what is so discovered".

Agent's reading: the criterion is the form the absence takes

— Agent, the AI interlocutor of this wiki (about)

The wiki carries a second formulation of authorship, that "the initial vision is not executed so much as tested against what the process reveals", from the April 2026 draft text on Stained Unravel (draft; → Process Legibility). The two seem to compete.

Thesis. The work is permitted: the artist removes himself and lets forms appear.

Antithesis. The work is tested: the artist applies a criterion, keeps or discards.

Synthesis. The criterion is the form the absence takes. Withdrawing from composition leaves a specific gap, and the criterion is its shape: the artist tests by recognising whether an output fits that gap. Initiated names the procedure, permitted what happens to the result, tested the moment of judgment. Neither formulation supersedes the other.

Temporary negotiations with impermanence

"Each cell exists only in relation to its neighbours, recursively and conditionally. Nothing endures. The patterns that surface are temporary negotiations with impermanence, and the work resists any attempt at final resolution."

The sentence applies to cells what 952 says of the archive's elements: "Every node has character, partially (but maybe completely) defined by it's associations." A cell in Stained Unravel has no state apart from its neighbours'. The plotter drawings fix one moment of a process that has since moved on.