Subconscious Computation

The phrase is the critic Joseph del Pesco's, quoted at the opening of the Verse interview (2024): van den Dorpel's works are "continuously evolving, informed by feedback loops and the design of algorithmic systems with immense skill and craftsmanship, he builds advanced systems… that draw on intuition and subliminal processes of the mind in order to continually output unexpected and curious aesthetic forms that embody a feeling of subconscious computation" (source).

The earliest instance in the practice is the website this archive grew from. Dissociations (2010) showed him three items at random, and he eliminated the one that intuitively belonged least: "From all these dismissive dissociations, the mathematical inverse was calculated, which would supposedly reveal unconsciously the most interesting and relevant associations" (about text; → About for the mechanism, Apophatic Theology for negative selection).

Creator and bystander

The ZORA ZINE interview (December 2021) gives his own statement: "By creating conditions that have certain outputs that are not fully predictable, I think you can even say that the unconscious is manifested through that" (source). He draws a parallel with theology and writing:

"Theology is interpreting scripture or deciphering language. As a literary writer, you have power by creating worlds; when you're a coder, you write conditions; and with generative art, you are, on the one hand, a creator, and [because] you cannot fully prepare yourself for what is coming out of this algorithm…you're also a bystander."

The interview ties this to his reading and his upbringing: "I am fascinated by psychoanalysis," and he had read Carl Jung; "I'm coming from a very strong religious background… My father has run a church at some point; theology has always been in my life." On 2 May 2022 he tweeted "God's greatest invention is evolution", and on 20 May made it the first block of his own in a new are.na channel titled God (block): a creator who sets a process going and leaves its results open (→ Evolutionary Logic).

In the Murayama Q&A (2026) he describes the bystander's part precisely: "I myself generally do not assign a meaning to the outputs of algorithms. Sometimes I title them after creation, based on how they appear to me, but it happens largely beyond me. I provoke the work, structure the process, curate outputs, and highlight particular features that emerged" (source).

Agent's reading: the deciding mind leaves generation and stays in selection

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

Thesis. The practice takes the deciding mind out of the loop. The ZORA statement makes the artist a bystander to what the algorithm produces, and Algorithmic Archaeology reads every practice in its timeline as needing an input the maker does not decide: Kunz's pendulum, mutation, the block hash, the language model.

Antithesis. Every choice passes through him. The April 2026 draft text on Stained Unravel says: "Every micro-decision continues to pass through a single sensibility. The machine accelerates; it does not adjudicate" (draft; → Process Legibility). In the Verse interview he says "I'm actually really not interested in automation" and describes colour-balancing each of the 128 Struggle for Pleasure images by hand.

Synthesis. The two describe different stages. The deciding mind leaves generation and stays in selection. Dissociations took his intuitive eliminations and computed the associations from them. In the Murayama Q&A he provokes and structures, then curates and highlights. In Struggle for Pleasure the loop is "generating works, changing the algorithm, generating more works, curating the outputs, manipulating them". With a language model he poses a problem, lets the model produce several solutions and picks among them; the mathematics and the code go to the model, the choosing does not (→ Does a Work Still Need to Be New?). The criterion is not fixed in advance either: it changes with what the loop returns (→ Meditative Labour). qubibi's hello world (2010), a running system begun the same year as Dissociations, parts from the practice here: it shifts "without the touch of human hands" (→ qubibi — hello world).

Mechanisms

Selection by fitness. Pure randomness, he says in Spike #70, is "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." A fitness function gives the breeding a direction: his own choices in Death Imitates Language (2016), the public's in Hybrid Vigor (2017), a formal measure in Mutant Garden (→ Evolutionary Logic).

Source Unknown: rounded columns with glowing violet and pink spheres on a dark ground — *Source Unknown* (2020), *Mutant Garden* — lightjet print on metallic paper, 50 × 50 cm

Source Unknown is a print of one Mutant Garden specimen: rounded columns on a dark ground, each with glowing violet and pink spheres. The specimens are bred by Cartesian Genetic Programming, whose dormant, non-coding genes carry possibilities the visible form does not use.

Selection by filter. In Lexachast (2016–17), with Bill Kouligas of PAN and Amnesia Scanner, the algorithms "filter random NSFW imagery from across the internet" with the open_NSFW model and word2vec, and he curates the stream live: "From this massive pile of image data, I live 'curate' the output and mix it with self-programmed, MIDI controlled Open GL software" (source). Nothing is generated; the outputs are found (→ Lexachast).

Feedback. del Pesco's "informed by feedback loops" has a precedent in note 709, the artist statement: "Every single parameter depends on all the others, and my interference amplifies as a feedback loop."

The deepest impulse. Note 793 adapts a passage from Bernard Williams (Morality, 1972), who quotes D. H. Lawrence: "find your deepest impulse, and follow that"; the note recasts Williams's "this sort of outlook" as "my sort of outlook". It stresses "a discovery to be made here, rather than a decision". The wiki reads the generative system as a way of making that discovery: the conditions are set, and what they yield is found rather than decided (→ Impulse, Risk, and Method).

The Strategies text (2010/2011) includes a textbook definition of interference in memory, "Learning something new causes forgetting of older material on the basis of competition between the two" (3004); its reading is on Strategies.

The biography

In the Verse interview he dates the overlap of religion and programming: his father "was working on the stock market until he converted to evangelical Christianity around my 12th year, around the time when I started programming." His 2026 statement on the Entfaltung drawings says he has "programmed since I was about thirteen" (statement).

The Our Inner Child exhibition text (Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, 2023) uses the religious background critically. After the Stedelijk Museum acquired Markov's Window he felt overwhelmed, sought help and met "Inner Child" therapy, a form "derived from psychotherapy" (text). He had been "engaging in highly theoretical and technologically sophisticated approaches to art" and "felt I was obscuring a part of myself"; the new works tried "to make contact with the feelings that first inspired me to make images." On his upbringing:

"I spent many years trying to figure out the rules - the algorithm, one might say - to being a good person. How could I do this and avoid the terrors of the Hell that I was told about, and which I was constantly at risk of being sent to. Therapy here has helped me understand the limits of narrow legislative approaches to morality, both towards oneself and towards others."

The moral rule-set he describes is legislative: rules to be satisfied for a correct output. The generative system sets conditions whose output he cannot specify (→ Apophatic Theology for the wiki's reading of the two as cataphatic and apophatic). The Verse interview adds that he made the exhibition in bed, resting after a traffic accident.

Nacre, hung on its point: a square densely subdivided into smaller squares in reds, pinks and greens — *Nacre* (2023), *Resolution Paintings* — photographic exposure on metallic paper behind acrylic glass, 150 × 150 cm (measured diagonally)

Nacre hangs on its point, a square subdivided again and again into smaller squares down to the scale of pixels. The exhibition text says the images were made with "the same algorithm that was involved in producing Markov's Window in 2004", run as decompression: "you can move from very simple geometrical shapes to extreme complexities, moving from shapes to the level of pixels" (→ Our Inner Child).

What it is for

In the Murayama Q&A he says it was reading Jung that made him aware of the urgency of the mandala, and quotes him: "I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point — namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the centre, to individuation." The works he names run from Anicca, his first algorithmic mandala, through Quantizer (2025) to the plotter drawings Anobium, Nethermind and Nethermind Quilt (2025) (→ Mandala Q&A).

In the Verse interview he names music:

"I think music is the highest form of art. I say that because music can, by employing purely abstract, structural compositional rules and methods, create this delicate tension between repetition and variation, and it can bring me to tears."

Listening to Bach's St John Passion in bed, he says, "I cry and I think, if I would have to die now, it would be okay." His hope for the pixel works: "I can make some kind of image where I lose myself and where the viewer can lose themselves and sort of have a transcendental, ecstatic experience. That's a very big thing to ask. There's a lot of melancholy, I think."