Release early, release often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity (Abrons Arts Center, New York, 2013)

Source: press release. Reading: Openness — Release Early, Release Often.

Van den Dorpel's first solo exhibition in the United States ran at Abrons Arts Center, New York, from 19 April to 7 June 2013. Karen Archey organised it as the centre's 2012–2013 AIRspace curatorial resident; it was funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with additional support from Collection Native Informant. The title comes from Eric S. Raymond's description of Linus Torvalds's development style in The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1997); the press release calls it "a credo of computer programmers in the open source movement".

The checklist (→ 1035)

Note 1035 is the artist's draft checklist for the show, with locations and remarks. It is not a record of what was finally hung.

Collages and drawings (at Wilkinson, London, or in his Berlin studio):

• Five untitled collages (2012), 50 × 40cm, one of them described as "Engraving on glass, prints, matte, paint, combined drawings from Deviant Arts"
• Randomness, Decisions, and Human Nature (2012): 100 × 70cm, 50 × 40cm
• History States (2012): 40 × 50cm
• Four drawings on paper (three 2013, one 2012)

Spherical Perspex assemblages (at Utah MoCA or Wilkinson):

• Assemblage (About Reviews and Press) (2012): digital UV print on hand cut synthetic glass, 95 × 95 × 95cm
• Assemblage (Canvas) (2012): digital print of scanned canvas on hand cut synthetic glass, 85 × 95 × 85cm
• Assemblage (Shell): listed as 2012, 90 × 95 × 100cm (harm.work gives 2011, 100 × 100 × 100cm), and Assemblage (Armor) (2012), 76 × 87 × 70cm. Of both he wrote: "Not sure if this one fits in the curatorial premise of recursion and self-referentiality. I'd prob rather not show it."
• Assemblage (Portrait of Collector's Dog) (2013): work in progress, Berlin

Web-based and animated works (online): Highway (2008), Ethereal Self (2008), Wishing Well .biz (2013), Cloud on Title (2012), Scroll (2007), Untitled (Dutch Fractal) (2005). Three of them, Ethereal Self, Wishing Well .biz and a Facebook photo album, are marked "Show in Red Hook Journal", an online venue. The list ends with SSH (2013), "Work in progress (logo?, collage?)".

The works on paper hang at mixed sizes in thin black frames: a pencil drawing of two hands mounted on grey linen, a collage built around a black-and-white print of a face, and a large panel of cut, layered clear and textured sheets.

The hand-drawing chain

The press release's central example of recursion:

A drawing of a hand appropriated from DeviantArt.com reappears in one of Van den Dorpel's collages, which was used as the lead image for a March 2012 exhibition in London; the same drawing reappears in reviews of the exhibition online and in print media, and finally recurs as a screenshot of an exhibition review printed on a strip of Plexi twisted into a new Perspex sculpture.

1. A hand drawing taken from DeviantArt
2. A collage built on it
3. The collage as lead image for About (Wilkinson Gallery, London, March 2012)
4. The drawing in online and print reviews of About
5. A screenshot of a review printed on a Plexi strip
6. The strip twisted into a new spherical Perspex sculpture

The reviews in step 4 can be named from the two screenshot sheets the artist made for the strips: the artnews.org listing, which used the hand collage as its image, Paul Hobson's notice for the Contemporary Art Society (Hobson's Choice, 23 March 2012), a Tumblr photograph by Ben Vickers from 1 March 2012, and two blog reviews (→ About (Wilkinson Gallery, 2012)).

An installation view the artist filed on are.na shows two links of the chain in one frame. The second framed work from the left is Untitled (collage with hands) (2012), the collage built on the appropriated drawing. At the lower right edge of the frame, a curved strip of synthetic glass carries the printed listing for About at Wilkinson Gallery, "9 March – 22 April 2012". The hanging sphere beside it is made of twisted transparent strips printed with photographs of arms and hands.

The last link: a sphere of curved transparent strips printed with screenshots of web pages, among them the artist's name, site menus ("In News", "Contact") and press images. A smaller dark sphere of printed arms and hands hangs behind it (1122).

The press release reads the chain as the work recurring "through both physical and virtual domains". Each stage is made from the record of the one before, which is 992's "The Work = The Work + Its Documentation" carried out in material. Note 729, the archive entry for the show, is one of the few notes whose list of related notes begins with itself (→ Recursion and Self-Reference).

The press release's framework

Archey's text names three frames: recursion, demonstrated through the hand chain; association, the works "installed associatively rather than by medium or chronology, evincing the artist's desire to achieve meaning through contingency and his interest in medium permeability"; and data mining, dissociations.com as a tool through which he can "data mine" his own activity. It connects the work to "the trajectory of institutional critique as well as the approach of cultural anthropology", and ends with the collector who asked for a new Perspex piece and was offered "a sculpture out of reconfigured Facebook photos of the collector's dog".

See also

• Openness — Release Early, Release Often — the reading of the title and of recursion through the public
• Recursion and Self-Reference — recursion across the practice
• Assemblage Identity — the Perspex assemblages
• Works Overview — Abrons in the chronological catalogue