Loomer (2015) — First Solo Show in Los Angeles

Source: sources/ingested/loomer-2015-press-release.md

The show

Loomer (2015) was van den Dorpel's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. It presented an array of formerly unmaterialized poster collages alongside sculptures and animations, drawing on five years of accumulated output. No harm.work page has been located for the exhibition; the sole primary source is note 2003.

Breaking the third person

The press release opens by naming a convention the text is about to break:

"When writing texts for my own exhibitions, I used to pretend and write them in the third person: 'the artist', 'Van den Dorpel', 'he'. An outsider perspective suggests neutrality, and protects me from explaining my own work."

The third person is explicitly a pretense — a protective distance that performs objectivity while avoiding self-disclosure. The word "pretend" is unambiguous. In this text, the pretense is dropped.

This connects to the process legibility argument at the level of authorial voice: the neutral third person is a form of ars celare artem applied to the exhibition text — concealing the artist's presence behind the appearance of critical description. Dropping it is a structural reveal. The artist appears in the frame, just as the process appears in the work.

Identity resistance

"I still hesitate to call myself an artist. At obligatory gatherings I prefer to say I'm a computer programmer, which is more tangible."

The hesitation is biographical, but it maps precisely onto the label-agnosticism that appears throughout the vault. "I used to be called a net artist, then I was a Post-Internet artist, now I'm a crypto artist. I don't care." (→ semiotic square). Refusing a fixed identity is the same refusal to occupy a cell on the square. "Computer programmer" is preferred not because it is more accurate but because it is more tangible — it describes what actually happens at the desk, rather than what the desk's output is called.

"Post internet" — a label that runs out

"I never minded the label 'post internet' but know it is not sustainable. The fact that the internet is my material doesn't mean much anymore. It's 2015 and modes of appropriation are default."

By 2015, internet-sourced imagery and networked distribution are so normalized as working conditions that they no longer carry critical or aesthetic charge as such. The label describes a moment — early 2010s, when the internet's penetration into everyday life was newly thematizable — not a sustained position. Once the moment passes and the condition becomes universal, the label stops doing work. The "post internet" artist is no longer distinguishable from everyone who uses the internet, which is everyone.

This is the semiotic square's New/Not-New axis enacted in art-historical time: "post internet" was New (a position) and has become Not-New (a default). The question of what survives the label's exhaustion is the same question the square ends with: relevance.

The work runs ahead

"Shared blobs, organised algorithmically. I can't be productive without programming a system. What the work is about, runs ahead of myself, and I will never quite fully catch up with it (even though I suspect it's always about the same)."

This is the most direct statement in the vault of the maker-work gap. Compare 793: "find your deepest impulse, and follow that — the notion that there is something that is one's deepest impulse, that there is a discovery to be made here, rather than a decision." But where 793 describes a philosophical structure, 2003 describes a lived experience: the work is literally ahead of the maker's understanding of it. Not: "I choose not to over-explain." But: "I cannot catch up."

The parenthetical is crucial: "(even though I suspect it's always about the same)." The work runs ahead — is perpetually novel to its maker — but may be a continuous investigation of a single underlying thing. This is the temporal structure of the practice: always arriving somewhere new that turns out to be a different angle on the same destination. Compare 952: "upon arrival its novelty fades immediately" — not because the destination was empty, but because it was already implicit in where you set out from.

The New that condenses into the Known

"There is still a potentiality in the 'new', regardless how quickly it condensates into a 'known', which then slips through my fingers again."

This is the most direct engagement in the vault with the problem the semiotic square diagnoses. The New carries potentiality — before it has been categorized, named, digested, turned into Not-New. But this potentiality is brief: novelty "condensates into a known" almost immediately upon arrival. The artist's position is not to stay ahead of this process (which is impossible) but to maintain sensitivity to the moment of condensation — to register the potentiality before it is extinguished. The image of breath on a cold screen — "small drops of spit land on it" — captures this: the mark of proximity, the physical trace of attention, evaporating.

"Slips through my fingers again" — the known cannot be held either. It does not stabilize into permanent possession; it passes, and the potentiality of the next new opens. The practice is this cycle: potential → condensation → dissolution → potential. Not progress toward a terminus but a rhythm of encounter.