Struggle for Pleasure — Verse SOLOS London, 2024

Curated by Leyla Fakhr. Press release written by William Kherbek, based on a conversation with Harm van den Dorpel, 2023: Struggle for Pleasure press release. The artist's own account of the series, from the Twitter Spaces talk that preceded the show, is summarised at Verse Twitter Spaces (2024).

The exhibition

harm.work lists four wall objects, all from the series Swallow, Only Shallow and all photographic exposures on metallic paper, 100×100 cm: Person in a Field, Vortex, A Vale of Tears and Creation of Light (editions of 2 + 1 AP). Beside them were the NFT collections Struggle for Pleasure and Swallow, only Shallow, two of whose tokens, Boulevard and 1995, harm.work lists separately. The press release names only Person in a Field, Creation of Light and the two collections.

Two of the framed wall objects, one pink and one green, hang on opposite white walls of the gallery.

Struggle for Pleasure is a collection of 128 tokens on Ethereum. The token metadata describes it as based on "the artists' continuous engagement with foundational algorithms in computer science which began around 2005, in this case with particular focus on the implementation of a 'quadtree'": the square is split into four, and each part again, so that blocks of very different sizes sit side by side. Pompidou shows it plainly, with large flat blocks beside fields of tiny hatched cells in blue, grey, pink and orange. Each token carries its render time as a trait (Pompidou: 29 December 2023), so the collection reads as a dated sequence. In the Twitter Spaces talk he said he also colour-balanced each image by hand after rendering.

Swallow, Only Shallow is a series of twelve works, four material and eight released only as NFTs. harm.work: "These are created with a similar image subdivision algorithm as 'Struggle for Pleasure', but instead of making the decisions of which pixel operation to employ, or how to calculate the next colour in a geometric generative fashion, I fed it existing found images." The title combines two My Bloody Valentine songs, "Swallow" (Tremolo EP) and "Only Shallow" (Loveless), both 1991, and the series is "heavily inspired by the complex textures of distortion in Shoegaze music". In Person in a Field a lone figure stands in a field of pink, yellow and violet pixels.

Vortex turns pink, white and violet pixels in a spiral around a dark centre.

The press release

Kherbek wrote the release in van den Dorpel's first person, from a conversation in 2023. Its argument runs in five steps.

The title. It is borrowed from "a musical piece released in 1983 by the Belgian composer Wim Mertens, generally positioned in the 'Minimalist' tradition. There are aspects of the composition that I always find myself falling for, even though there are other aspects I find a bit kitschy." The response is double: "I find myself liking and resisting the work simultaneously. I don't want it to work on me, but it does. It is a work that lives up to its title; it is a struggle but a pleasurable one." It leads to the question the show takes up: "how pleasure can often seem suspicious somehow, and why this might be."

The pixel against nostalgia. "There is a kind of rhyming element between the fundamental features of minimalist composition and the minimal units of digital display." Pixel art that plays on 8-bit graphics, or CryptoPunks, "lean[s] into pixelisation by exploiting nostalgia": "The works become about the viewer, but less about who they are personally, than about their generational position. While this is pleasure, it didn't seem to be a lasting pleasure for me." Instead he "researched how we relate to pixels, how they reveal something about how we perceive and mentally construct images. They appeal to a general cognitive faculty, but each assemblage or organisation of pixels has a personal, individualised aspect."

Pointillism. Monet's "elusive coherency of strokes" and Seurat's Pointillism "sought to find a place where perception, image, and emotion met." "The point is information, but it can only become meaningful in the presence of other points, and other minds. In these works, I seek to take the fundamental element of digital display and examine how it can be dialogic rather than simply nostalgic."

A gentler process. "Historically, I dedicated myself to an iterative algorithmic process which in the end hermetically generated the final 'pleasurable images' to be released. In the past, that iterative process involved a great deal of loss, discarding all outputs before the final algorithm would be complete. For 'Struggle for Pleasure', I opted for a different, gentler process: keeping images generated at all points during the iteration process and curating them into a final selection. Therefore, the collection is not merely a product of the final outputs of the final state of the algorithm but a kind of historical and procedural window on the chronological process itself." The render-time trait on each token is that window in the data. In the Twitter Spaces talk he names what he used to discard: Mutant Garden Seeder took about two years, and its intermediate outputs were thrown away. The wiki's account of process made visible is on Process Legibility.

Simple operations, mandala, uncertainty. "Here, I chose very simple operations - rather similar to the austere approaches that define minimal music - to apply to the images, such as mirroring, rotation, repetition, and in particular subdivision. The outputs often paradoxically took on an exceptionally complex, transcendental quality not unlike, for me, the way the apparently straightforward components of a mandala can. Simplicity of operation can become a window into territories of complexity where knowledge itself breaks down." The release ends: "This openness to uncertainty and to the dialogic process of the realisation of a work is central to the struggle for pleasure that defined the creation of the works on show here. It is my uncertainty, but it appeals to a wider openness, an openness where pleasure can flourish." The mandala comparison is developed on Sacred Geometry.

See also

• Verse Twitter Spaces (2024) — the artist on pixels, resolution, hand colour-balancing and shoegaze
• Afterimage — the tokens Relieved Afterimage and Loveless; shoegaze
• Process Legibility — the kept iterations as process made visible
• Randomness and Pattern — pixel resolution and the eye's reconstruction of the image
• Works Overview — the works in chronological context