Four Single Works, 2013–2021
These four works stand alone on harm.work: no series, no exhibition, little or no text. They are described here from their images and, for the website, from its code. Other single works of these years have homes elsewhere: the website Transplant (2015) on Software Editions and Lexachast, the poster Merch Clouds (2019) on Editions and Small Collections, and the website Hyphenation .xyz (2019) on Différance.
Untitled Collage (2013)
Untitled Collage is dated 7 December 2013 on harm.work and filed as a print, with no size or medium. Its base is a black-and-white photograph of a woman's face half hidden by blown hair, stretched and blurred, and still carrying the repeated watermark of the stock agency depositphotos. Over it lie two blue rings, one inside the other, three flat shapes shading from lilac through pink to yellow, and strokes of thick, pale, bluish paint whose texture is that of a scan. The second image on harm.work shows the whole sheet: the composition fills the upper two thirds, and the bottom third is blank paper.
The watermark was not removed. A stock agency's mark turns up again in Stock Contents (2019, minted 2022), a Lexachast render in which the logo shows through the overlapping images (→ Lexachast). The collage follows the 2012 works the wiki records, in which scanned painting is combined with digital operations and found images (→ Zeuchnungen; Release Early, Release Often (2013)).
Untitled (forgotten) (2015)
harm.work describes Untitled (forgotten) as a "Generative animation running on a Raspberry Pi with integrated display in custom transparent printed frame." The photograph shows a sheet of clear acrylic against a grey wall, a cable running from its top edge. A black border is printed on it, filled with white contour lines like those of a relief map, and two thin white rules run inside the border. In the middle, behind the acrylic, sits a small upright screen.
On the screen is a long, pointed leaf or cocoon shape built of segments outlined in blue, like a piece of stained glass. Around it float the icons of a phone interface: a thumbs-up and a question mark above, a thumbs-down and a light bulb on the left, an umbrella below, and a clock reading 18:25 in the corner. Across the middle runs the line "Confusion leads to prayer", one of the truisms or platitudes the work's algorithm generates (the artist, November 2026). The reflections of fluorescent tubes cross the acrylic.
No text says what the animation does or where the sentence comes from. The long pointed form recalls the hanging Chrysalis sculptures of the same year (→ Sculpture and the Object), and the sentence the religious vocabulary he has spoken about elsewhere (→ Subdued Iconoclasm). The word in brackets stands where a title would be.
Dark Calendar .com (2019)
Dark Calendar .com is a website, dated December 2019 on harm.work and still online at darkcalendar.harmvandendorpel.com, under the page title "Dark Calendar by Harm van den Dorpel, 2019". The domain darkcalendar.com now belongs to someone else. The site is a week view in the style of a calendar app, white type on near-black, which always opens on the current week with a red line marking the present hour. In the screenshot on harm.work the week is 13–19 December 2020 and the line crosses Thursday at about half past five.
The week is empty. The site's code does contain events: five untitled blocks in green, yellow, grey-blue and blue, all in the week of 27 January 2019. Two fill the whole of 28 January; three, of two hours and twenty minutes each, sit around midday on the 27th, 28th and 29th. They are filled at a third of full opacity, as faint coloured blocks. A visitor sees them only by paging back to that week; every other week shows nothing but the grid and the moving red line. The code does not say what happened in those three days.
Dark mode had come to desktop software a year earlier, when Apple introduced it across macOS in 2018. The work takes a familiar planning interface, leaves out the appointments, and keeps the indicator of the present running. The wiki's reading of the interface grid is on The Grid, under The grid as interface.
Slanted Magazine (2021)
harm.work records Slanted Magazine, dated January 2021, with two words of text, 'Magazine, "AI"', and one photograph: a man in a black cap and a white T-shirt printed "You love my work." in a serif face, standing in a room hung with artificial yellow blossoms.
Slanted is a design magazine published in Karlsruhe. Its issue #37, Spring/Summer 2021, is titled AI: 288 pages on artificial intelligence in design, with a printed cover motif by CROSSLUCID different on every copy (Slanted). The publisher's pages do not list the contributors, and what van den Dorpel contributed is not recorded on harm.work or in this archive. The T-shirt in the photograph was made by William Kherbek (the artist, November 2026).
See also
- Lexachast — Stock Contents and the found-image pool
- Sculpture and the Object — the Chrysalis sculptures of 2015
- Software Editions — Transplant and the editioned programs
- Editions and Small Collections — Merch Clouds and Partition
- Différance — Hyphenation .xyz, the other website of 2019