Strategies (2010/2011)

Video still: the line A wide range of vulgarities are commonplace over red and green ribbons — *Strategies* (2010/2011), video still

The still sets the line "A wide range of vulgarities are commonplace" over a tangle of red and green ribbons.

Source: Strategies transcript (3004); harm.work/work/strategies

The work

Strategies was "Created on the occasion of a group exhibition at the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma, curated by Valentina Tanni" (harm.work). The harm.work text, by Ché Zara Blomfield, calls it "a sequel to Showreel, documents the process of making collages. Screenshots, images and other found footage were collected over the course of two months and combined with rewritten phrases of advice given by business experts, martial arts gurus, software developers and Jacques Derrida. The background track was made by Van den Dorpel in 2002 and was never used before, for anything particular." The transcript gives twenty-two lines under the heading "STRATEGIES, 2011". The ingested transcript names the Rome exhibition Maps & Legends (2010); harm.work gives neither title nor year.

A companion video of the same years, built the same way from other people's sentences, is The Four Master Tropes (2011).

Where the lines come from

Several lines can be traced:

"When you must fail, fail noisely and as soon as possible" is Eric S. Raymond's Rule of Repair from The Art of Unix Programming (2003), word for word but for the spelling.
"Distrust all claims for one true way" is Raymond's Rule of Diversity ("Distrust all claims for 'one true way'").
"There is no need to solve the same problem twice" and "Boredom and drudgery are evil but freedom is good and attitude is no substitute for competence" rewrite four points of the hacker attitude in Raymond's How To Become A Hacker: "No problem should ever have to be solved twice", "Boredom and drudgery are evil", "Freedom is good", "Attitude is no substitute for competence".
"Welcome changing demands, even late in execution" rewrites a principle of the Agile Manifesto: "Welcome changing requirements, even late in development."
"The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change" circulates in software writing; Tom DeMarco's Slack cites it as "Fisher's fundamental theorem", a popular rendering of an idea from population genetics.
"Learning something new causes forgetting of older material on the basis of competition between the two" is the textbook definition of interference theory in the psychology of memory.

The remaining lines have not been traced, including whatever comes from the martial arts gurus and from Derrida. Some lines are verbatim, some rewritten, and none is attributed, so a Unix design rule and a sentence on authenticity stand in the same list with the same weight.

Video still: the line Boredom and drudgery are evil but freedom is good and attitude is no substitute for competence over translucent renderings — *Strategies* (2010/2011), video still

This still carries Raymond's hacker attitude, "Boredom and drudgery are evil but freedom is good and attitude is no substitute for competence", over translucent renderings of a box shape and an ornate painted figure.

Lines the wiki returns to

"All takes place at the same time, non-dialectically"

The next line is "Seeing everything at the same time, you get the ability to reverse causality". Their source is unidentified. Other pages read the pair in different ways: as positions on the semiotic square that coexist instead of replacing one another, and as the field of differences in which those positions sit (Différance). Read as a description of practice it fits reverse engineering: with output and system both in view, one can work from the effect back to its cause (Impulse, Risk, and Method). These are the wiki's readings.

"The past haunts the present, but equally important so does the future"

The line reads like a rewrite of Jacques Derrida's hauntology in Specters of Marx (1993), where the specter returns from the past and also announces what is still to come. Its exact source has not been found, but the artist holds it as his own conviction (November 2026). The thesis page Does a Work Still Need to Be New? takes up hauntology in Mark Fisher's later sense, the lost futures of a culture that recycles its past. Compare the Loomer press release (2015): "What the work is about, runs ahead of myself, and I will never quite fully catch up with it" (3003).

"After all, authenticity can be thought of as style too"

If authenticity is a style, it is a manner one can adopt, imitate and rewrite, as the list itself rewrites everyone it draws on. The source of the line is unidentified.

"Over time, beautiful things tend to thrive, and ugly things tend to get discarded"

Read beside the later work, this is selection stated in aesthetic terms. In Death Imitates Language (2016) the artist "made the matches between specimens myself and decided which got to 'live' and 'die'" (Spike #70; → Evolutionary Logic). The line predates the genetic works by five years, and its source is unidentified.

"When you must fail, fail noisely and as soon as possible"

Raymond's rule concerns programs: one that cannot finish should say so loudly and at once instead of passing on corrupted data. In this list it becomes a rule for risk in general: fail where the failure can be seen, and early, while correcting it is cheap (→ Impulse, Risk, and Method).