"The Squircle of Life" — Spike Magazine #70

Interview: Harm van den Dorpel × Tina Rivers Ryan, then curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Spike Art Magazine #70 (Winter 2021/22), pp. 110–119. Source: The Squircle of Life.

Overview

The conversation runs from net art through Post-Internet to Web3, the economics of left gallery and NFTs, genetic algorithms and fitness functions, the squircle, and Ryan's notion of algorithmic archaeology. It centres on Mutant Garden (2019–), shown at Upstream Gallery Amsterdam in 2021, with Death Imitates Language and Event Listeners (2015) as earlier cases.

Key ideas

1. Net art, Post-Internet, crypto

Ryan asks whether the return of utopian talk with Web3 means we are again "pre-" rather than "post-". For van den Dorpel, Post-Internet meant realising that the internet's utopian possibilities "turned out to be the opposite: mass surveillance and websites that are so bloated with advertisements that we don't load them anymore." He is "optimistic" about decentralised platforms "but also worried about what it means for all online activities to potentially become financialised transactions. I don't even know if it's good or bad, it's just what it's going to be." Web3 "did bring back the energy of early net art; it's really fun again. 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."

2. Randomness without direction

Generative art based on random numbers "is kind of fun for a while; it's 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." This is what led him to genetic algorithms (→ Randomness and Pattern).

3. Dating apps and four fitness functions

A video by Vinay Gupta about the neural networks behind dating apps, "optimised to create short-term relationships", made him think that because these relationships produce children, "the algorithms are essentially engineering ten percent of the Western population" — software developers and economists "designing our human species, in a direct and biopolitical way". (In the 2016 series statement he gives Gupta's estimate as "about 10% of the dates".) He asked himself whether he could "judge which outputs are better than others, and then breed those". He names four criteria, which he calls fitness functions:

Death Imitates Language (2016): "I made the matches between specimens myself and decided which got to 'live' and 'die'."
Hybrid Vigor (2017), "the version of that work" in which "people could make these decisions for me" (harm.work files the website under Algues Artificielles).
Nested Exchange (2017): the "hipster algorithm", in which a specimen was "more successful the more it was different from all the others… just like at a music festival, where everybody thinks they're unique, but also looks quite similar to everyone else there."
Most recently, "the very modernist thought that a successful composition is simple in construction but complicated as an aesthetic experience": complexity of construction measured as render time, complexity of experience as file size after compression. "But now, with generative art, the complexity comes from recursion, creating modular systems with repetition and nesting like Matryoshka dolls."

The four are compared on Evolutionary Logic.

Sydgator Zolim Juancar, a Death Imitates Language specimen — *Sydgator Zolim Juancar*, *Death Imitates Language* (2018)

Hybrid Vigor .bio, a generation of eight specimens — *Hybrid Vigor .bio* (2017)

*Cussos Unfence Thermographers*, *Nested Exchange* (2018)

*Crystallophobia*, *Mutant Garden* (2020)

4. Squares and the squircle

Ryan notes that he showed Mutant Garden at Upstream Gallery as live screens and printed "wall objects", including squares. She reads the square through Malevich, for whom it refused representation and "heralds abstraction", and against "the default format of Instagram posts and our profile pictures": digital art, even abstract, is "about the embeddedness of art within social and technical systems."

Two framed prints of nested squircle compositions on a white panelled wall — *Mutant Garden*, installation view, Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, 2021

Two of the framed prints in the Amsterdam show, on a panelled wall beside a stucco pilaster: grids of rounded, nested modules in pinks, violets and greens.

Van den Dorpel takes the point and moves from the square to the squircle: "the elements in my work are taken from user interfaces. A very important element is the so-called squircle, which is a square circle." The rounded corners of Mac interfaces are "supposed to give it a human feel. Actually, they're horrible"; "the squircle is considered impure. Mathematicians hate it. And yet, this is the primary shape that defines the aesthetics of the interfaces of our era. For me, to intervene in contemporary life means to operate on the level of user interface design." In Mutant Garden "even the artwork itself changes depending on the window size" (→ Squircle Geometry).

5. Mutability, aura, fossils

Asked whether tokenising mutable work contradicts it, he says the degree of fixity "is really a design question. The problem is: you can't commodify something that always changes. I also think it has to do with creating an aura, the feeling that there's one singular artwork." Of Mutant Garden's FAQ question, what happens if the mutation algorithm stops: "In that case, I would call them fossils. Which means that at some point, the work died. And that's okay." Collectors can also run the software locally, against a single point of failure (→ Senescenence, Evolutionary Logic).

6. Algorithmic archaeology

Ryan takes up his phrase for using Cartesian Genetic Programming "because it was made in the 90s": algorithms "are not just pieces of math that are objective and universal and true, but that like fossils, they themselves have a history", against the crypto slogan "code is law". Van den Dorpel adds that the newest Windows "still uses code from twenty years ago… you can see remnants of Windows 3.1; it's still there", a system too large for anyone to grasp: "In that sense, code is law, as some things are just too large to change. You cannot replace the sewer system in New York." Ryan: "Maybe code isn't law, but rather destiny." He ends with the algorithm's origin: it "was made for industrial circuit board development, but also other engineering problems that are way too hard to compute directly… And maybe that's a nice metaphor for making art." The method is developed on Algorithmic Archaeology.

7. Event Listeners (2015)

Ryan calls Event Listeners "the first tokenised work ever purchased by a museum" (the MAK Vienna bought it with Bitcoin in 2015; → left gallery) and notes that he editioned the program rather than its outputs. He describes it as "a generative work that uses relatively simple algorithms to define recursive structures we often find in nature, like how trees branch", like the screensavers of the 1990s, "overlaid with these descriptions of experiences that I would have in social situations where one also follows a script, like family birthday parties." Its melancholy comes from a childhood without internet, outside a big city: "I was trying to understand the world and myself by writing software and making aesthetic systems. But in the end, I was just more isolated."