Our Inner Child — Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, 2023

Solo exhibition, Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, opening 11 November 2023. Exhibition text by the artist: Our Inner Child (also on harm.work).

The show

harm.work lists seven wall objects (Klimt, Sprite, Field (double exposure), Synthesis Euphoria, Hell, Nacre, Rite), two prints (Pivot, Altibzz), three NFTs (Spawn (Colour Inversion Study), Diagnostics, Markov's Window 2023) and Recursive Intervention. The wall objects and prints belong to the Resolution Paintings: photographic exposures on metallic paper, the largest mounted behind acrylic glass in aluminium frames, and two UltraChrome HD prints on Canson paper (Pivot, Altibzz). They run from 85 × 85 cm to 150 × 150 cm; for the framed works "Dimensions are measured diagonally", because several hang on their points.

Synthesis Euphoria is a square turned on its point, filled with nested squares and triangles in magenta, pink, violet and yellow, subdivided again and again into smaller cells.

Recognition and overwhelm

The text opens: "This solo show comes at the end of a very intense period of my life. After a run of successful exhibitions, the hysterical rise (and fall) of NFTs, and the acquisition by the Stedelijk Museum of Markov's Window for their collection. These felt like a kind of vindication of the work I had been doing, the culmination of decades of work, and a sense of arrival at an institutional level for generative art." He had "sometimes lost hope" that institutions would accept generative art "as an equal to the major artistic movements of the last century". Then: "I found myself in a kind of frenzy of obligations and conversations, and it all became a bit too much to handle. Recognition made me want to become a hermit."

His are.na channel God shows where the wish went. On 8 December 2023, with the show still open, he saved a documentary in which Bill Porter revisits the Zen hermits of the Zhongnan mountains (block); during the preparation he had saved a clip of Slavoj Žižek on psychoanalysis and Buddhism (28 August 2023, block). Zen talks by Norman Fischer go back to January 2021 (block) and continue in March 2024 (block).

Inner Child therapy

"During the period in which I felt this instability in my life, I sought out professional help and in doing so I became familiarised with 'Inner Child' therapy." It made him consider "aspects of my situation, and my own biography in more detail than I had ever previously done, and it also gave me a new perspective on my work." In the 2021 ZORA interview he had said he was "fascinated by psychoanalysis" and had read Carl Jung (→ ZORA ZINE); here the subject is his own biography.

"For a long time, I had been engaging in highly theoretical and technologically sophisticated approaches to art. This cerebral approach certainly brought me to ideas that yielded interesting aesthetic results, but also I felt I was obscuring a part of myself. The works in this exhibition grew out of this period of searching into my own psyche, and attempting to make contact with the feelings that first inspired me to make images. Where once I might have felt insecure that certain artistic choices, certain colourful compositions, for example, immediately appealed to me, and I might have sought something more supposedly 'intellectual' to buttress a creation I viscerally enjoyed, here I have chosen to embrace that immediate sense of joy and bring the viewer into those moments of creative freedom and excitement."

A year later the Struggle for Pleasure text, by William Kherbek, came back to the question from the other side: there, pleasure "can often seem suspicious somehow" (→ Struggle for Pleasure).

The rules of being good

"Something that became apparent to me was the sense that we must accept the complexity of our minds and not attempt to judge ourselves according to rigid systems of rules. … In my own story, this has meant thinking back to the religious orthodoxy that characterised my 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 word "algorithm" is his, used for the moral rules of his childhood, with the hedge "one might say". The text does not apply it to his generative work. Reading the two together (rules meant to produce correct behaviour against rules that let something unforeseen appear) is the wiki's step, made on Apophatic Theology and Subconscious Computation. In ZORA he drew the opposite, positive parallel between his religious background and his role towards his systems; both accounts come from the same biography.

Hell hangs on its point, a field of small triangles and squares in red, orange, black and white, darker towards the lower right. It is one of the three largest works in the show, with Synthesis Euphoria and Nacre. The text mentions "the terrors of the Hell that I was told about"; harm.work gives no comment on the title.

The 2025 plotter drawing Endless Knot, on the Tibetan Buddhist symbol of saṃsāra, was not in this show; it is discussed on Recursion and Self-Reference and The Lozenge.

Compression and decompression

"To create the images for this show, I used the same algorithm that was involved in producing Markov's Window in 2004. In the ensuing years, computing power and my own abilities had become more sophisticated and in revisiting the technology, I began to think about the way that compression and decompression work in the artistic space. I thought about the way that painters such as Mondriaan and Theo van Doesburg would look at, for example, a tree and take the enormous amount of complexity they would perceive and reduce it to a few shapes or lines to convey its essence. You could think of this as a kind of compression which perhaps reaches its highest level in Mondriaan's grid-like canvases. I thought about what could happen if you moved in the opposite direction, taking something very basic, and applying the capacities of generative art to that form. In that way it becomes a process of decompression, you can move from very simple geometrical shapes to extreme complexities, moving from shapes to the level of pixels."

Mondrian and van Doesburg reduce a tree to a few lines; the algorithm starts from a few shapes and subdivides them down to single pixels. The are.na channel for the show, Our Inner Child ("Works and research of my solo exhibition at Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, opening 11/11/2023"), records the process. It opens on 21 July 2023 with van Doesburg. A screenshot of 22 July shows the 2004 algorithm at a few levels; by 27 September the same procedure runs until the smallest cells are a few pixels wide. The title Our Inner Child entered his list of candidate show titles on 6 October (block; → Show titles). On the lozenge format and Markov's Window see The Lozenge and Markov's Dream Palette.

A lozenge of large squares and triangles in orange, yellow, red and black on dark grey; only a few cells are subdivided once or twice.

Two months later the same lozenge is subdivided many levels down into small squares, circles and triangles in grey, orange, green and blue.

Why material objects

"My generative works are originally software, and originally were seen on screens with far lower resolutions than those of today, but any kind of screen display reduces visual complexity, therefore the only way these works could truly convey their full complexity was to produce them as material objects."

The series title follows from this: the prints carry the resolution the screen cannot (→ Mediation and the Archive).

Altibzz, named after an Autechre track, is a square of red, blue, white and yellow cells, larger blocks breaking up into finer checkered patterns.

Sprite is pale violet, white and navy, with pink and yellow accents and a few round, flower-like clusters of cells.

Klimt is an even, all-over mosaic of small squares in blue, red, white and green.

Our inner child

"We often speak of our own inner child, but what would it mean to embrace a larger sense of a collective inner child, the vulnerability and joy that lies at the heart of everyone. I invite visitors to begin exploring that question, to begin looking deeper at things, and embracing the complexities around us, in their full resolution."

The text moves from his own inner child to a collective one, and closes on "full resolution", the words in the series title. An older line in the archive makes the same move from the personal to the general: "Try to connect the personal with the universal; approach the general by being subjective" (709).

A digital image of Rite on its point in a black frame: orange, violet, grey and black triangles, with a dark medallion near the top.

Works

Recursive Intervention reflects the room and the works in it, "causing the space to contain a compressed version of itself" (→ Recursion and Self-Reference).

See also

• The Lozenge — the Resolution Paintings hung on their points; Markov's Window; Endless Knot
• Recursion and Self-Reference — Recursive Intervention; Endless Knot
• Subconscious Computation — the ZORA account of his religious background and his systems
• Struggle for Pleasure (2024) — pleasure as "suspicious somehow", a year later
• Mediation and the Archive — screens as a ceiling on resolution