Mandala Q&A — Goro Murayama × Harm van den Dorpel

Source: sources/ingested/mandala-qa-murayama-2026.md
Exhibition: Cloud Writings, Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2026 (→ Cloud Writings)
Interlocutor: Goro Murayama (村山悟郎, b. 1983), Japanese artist

Murayama sent three questions after seeing Cloud Writings. The two had exhibited together at the same gallery in 2022, in Okazaki, Sakamoto, van den Dorpel, Murayama. The answers name the mandalas the artist looked at and the works that construct them, the passage from Jung that made the form urgent for him, the kind of algorithm he uses, and how he relates a local algorithm to the mandala's cosmic scale.

1. Which mandalas, and the works

"I have primarily looked at Tibetan sand mandalas and Japanese Ryōkai Mandala mandalas." The Ryōkai Mandala, the Mandala of the Two Realms, pairs the Womb Realm and the Diamond Realm of esoteric Buddhism in Japan. He names the works in order:

Vertical streaks of magenta, red, grey and ochre run down the frame from a band of small coloured blocks at the top, divided into tall panels, like coloured sand falling. harm.work describes Anicca as "a series of eventually 8 two-phase animations, inspired by Buddhist sand drawings: an exercise in patience and reflection on impermanence"; two tokens exist. The answer does not say how Anicca is built.

Square frames in violet, rust and pale gradients nest around a four-fold symmetric centre, with a gate-like shape on each side. Quantizer's root traits include tibetan, thangka and mandala: the vocabulary is in the work's own typology (→ Quantizer).

The word reaches the working files two years before Anicca. On 30 September 2023, in the research channel for Our Inner Child, the artist saved a render named mandala_21236912_more_2_rotated (block). It is an output of the 2004 Markov's Window algorithm, turned 45° on a black ground and subdivided down to a few pixels, arranged loosely about a vertical axis without mirror symmetry. The render names the mandala without building one; his answer to Murayama dates the first construction to Anicca. The mandala analogy in the Struggle for Pleasure text (2024) therefore has a precedent in 2023, not in Anicca, which came later.

2. Jung

"It was in reading Carl Jung that I was made aware of their urgency, for example in this quote":

"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 passage is from Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962). The artist gives it as what drew him to the mandala, not as a programme for the works. The practice's other uses of Jung are on Subconscious Computation.

3. The algorithm

"Mandalas are often recursive structures. Shapes become containers for multiple, smaller shapes, in careful symmetrical subdivision. They communicate deep spiritual truths using highly structured and organised visual means. That in itself already sounds like generative art. I often use Markov Chains: the distribution of a certain step or operation happening is stochastically determined by the parent the new shape is in."

The chain he describes works inside one composition: what happens to a shape depends on the shape that contains it (→ Recursion; The Grid, under From nesting to the grid). It is a different thing from the memorylessness of Quantizer across time, where each block hash seeds a new composition independent of the one before (→ Randomness and Pattern). He says "often", about his mandala-inspired works in general; the answer does not say which works use the chain.

4. Local algorithm, cosmic image

Murayama asked how the localised algorithms of his works square with the mandala as "images that apply a macro-scale cosmic view to the human world". The answer: "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. The hermetic observation 'as above, so below' is at work in that I sometimes experience awe by staring through a simple construed surface, into the depths of complexity."

The four verbs, provoke, structure, curate and highlight, describe his part in a process whose outcome he does not set; the creator/bystander position is on Subconscious Computation. "As above, so below", and what it does and does not claim, is explained on Sacred Geometry.

See also

• Sacred Geometry — the traditions the practice names; "as above, so below"; Anicca and the sand mandala
• Cloud Writings (2026) — the exhibition; Anobium, Nethermind and Nethermind Quilt were in it
• Quantizer — the 256 tokens and their trait names
• Predecessors of Entfaltung — Anicca and Quantizer as predecessors of Entfaltung
• Subconscious Computation — Jung; creator and bystander
• Struggle for Pleasure (2024) — the earlier mandala remark