H

Verse Twitter Spaces — Harm van den Dorpel with Nico Epstein and Leyla Fakhr (2024)

Source: verse.works/journal/twitter-spaces-harm-van-den-dorpel…, published 18 January 2024. Full transcript: Twitter Spaces: Harm van den Dorpel in Conversation with Nico Epstein and Leyla Fakhr. Occasion: the exhibition Struggle for Pleasure at Verse SOLOS, London.

Pixels the mind fills in

He calls Struggle for Pleasure "my first commitment to pixels": as he raised the resolution of works like Mutant Garden Seeder, the components got smaller until "you couldn't really get smaller than a pixel". He keeps his distance from the nostalgia of 8-bit games and CryptoPunks, and starts from games he remembers as detailed that now look barely legible:

"So I think what is at play with pixels is that our mind tries to interpolate the space between those pixels and construct more complicated entities behind those pixels. By varying the resolution of the pixels within one work, my eyes and my mind was jumping back and forth between feeling that I understood what I saw and constructing what I thought it would be."

The animation shifts "between high resolution and low resolution, gradually increasing the resolution almost as if it's rendering the work. Normally when we are rendering something or sharpening an image, we expect something to be revealed. In this case, the resolution is sharpening but nothing more is revealed." He adds a later thought: pixellation is familiar as censorship, and "there is a certain almost macabre fascination with the low resolution image". The wiki's account of resolution and reconstruction is on Randomness and Pattern.

For Ray Johnson, Struggle for Pleasure
For Ray Johnson — Struggle for Pleasure token (2024)

Keeping every stage, and the hand

For Mutant Garden Seeder, about two years of work, he discarded outputs "because the algorithm wasn't perfect yet". This time he stored the highest-resolution image at each change "and gave it a timestamp", so "the series is a chronological overview of this process of programming. So it's 128 tokens. I also colour balanced each image manually after rendering because I love to obsess on that and bring out more what I noticed in the image that could be good. So as a generative artist it's like I'm completely cheating." Epstein answers "it's a labor of love", Fakhr "It's appreciating." The timestamp became a trait of each token; the work began "early December/end of November last year" and the last images were finished shortly before the talk.

He describes the workflow as "a feedback loop of generating works, changing the algorithm, generating more works, curating the outputs, manipulating them", with Photoshop and command-line tools, and states his position:

"It's not this hermetic approach to prove I can make an algorithm that does this all automatically, I'm actually really not interested in automation. In that sense I also have a complicated relationship to programs like Midjourney, I mean, I love them and they're amazing tools, but that thing that I'm not able to program is exactly the thing I want to emphasise. It is a certain human touch, which sounds really old fashioned and cringe almost, but to have this serendipity and these mistakes or things I don't imagine at first, I then focus on them and exaggerate them in post production and in Photoshop."

The wiki develops this on Process Legibility.

Shoegaze and Swallow, Only Shallow

The second series fed found images into the same resolution mechanics; Fakhr calls them album covers, he corrects her: "It's actually more video stills from that era than album covers." Its title joins two My Bloody Valentine songs, "Swallow" (Tremolo EP) and "Only Shallow" (Loveless), both 1991 (harm.work). On shoegaze:

"They're just like rock bands, they have a guitar, bass, drum kit, and they're singing, but with shoegaze it's almost as if the band is there only to supply signals for this half heavy signal processing chain, where the texture and the complexity of the harmonics is created by using lots of delays and echoes and all these other effects to create new textures."

"The texture of sound is something I can really relate to," he says, and he explains the name: guitarists "staring at the floor all the time" at their effects pedals. He links the series to older work: he used to process existing bitmaps years ago, "and I would also do that live with an electronic music ensemble", probably the live visuals of Lexachast.

Person in a Field
Person in a Field (2024) — Swallow, Only Shallow

Music as the highest art

Asked whether a rhythm guides the pixel patterns:

"First of all, and this is maybe a provocation, I think music is the highest form of art. I say that because music can, by employing purely abstract, structural compositional rules and methods, create this delicate tension between repetition and variation, and it can bring me to tears. Music has this very emotional capability, while at the same time, it is also very cerebral. And I'm a great lover of Johann Sebastian Bach, and sometimes when I listen to music in bed and I hear part of the Johann's Passion and I cry and I think, if I would have to die now, it would be okay. I'd rather not, but it would be okay. And I just hope that with something like pixels, I can make some kind of image where I lose myself and where the viewer can lose themselves and sort of have a transcendental, ecstatic experience. That's a very big thing to ask. There's a lot of melancholy, I think."

Net art, post-internet, and back

Asked about the labels, he describes net art made "to specifically comment on that context of the browser of your devices"; the invitation into galleries, where the work "became about other things"; and the shift "from commenting on the context of the internet, to instead commenting on the context of the gallery space", which produced sculpture. "It's not that the internet is over, but it is the sort of mindset from this internet generation expressed with material in a gallery space. I got sort of deep in that movement, but then I also started to miss my programming roots and went back more towards making art online."

Epstein, not van den Dorpel, then brings up Artie Vierkant's essay "The Image Object Post-Internet" (he dates it "2011 or so"; it is from 2010) and says Vierkant "no longer makes work at all", which is wrong: Vierkant's Image Objects series continued at least until 2019. Asked how the screen works become objects, van den Dorpel describes the photographic exposures on metallic paper, "pretty close to the colour space you can have on a screen", and his wish that they "can be hung next to an oil painting… Maybe I just always wanted to be a painter."

The Dutch tradition, inverted

Epstein asks whether there is something Dutch in his work:

"But one thing in this Dutch modernist tradition is that there's a sense of determinism. Mondriaan would obsess for a long time, I think, about how a particular composition would have to be, but for me it's actually the opposite. I generate things at random, or I breed generations, and then I curate and manipulate. It's very different, I embrace undecidedness. And I think in the modernist tradition they're more deterministic."

He mentions his background and teaching in Dutch graphic design. Fakhr recalls seeing his work beside Mondriaan in the Stedelijk Museum, "such a powerful display", the oil painting he had hoped to hang next to.

Biography

He describes a religious background: "My father used to run a church." Asked whether his father was a stockbroker, he answers: "he was working on the stock market until he converted to evangelical Christianity around my 12th year, around the time when I started programming." He made the exhibition Our Inner Child after a traffic accident: "I had to make the exhibition in bed because I had to rest" (→ Our Inner Child). The wiki reads the religious biography on Subconscious Computation.

Blockchain as immutability

Asked about on-chain and off-chain works, he contrasts Mutant Garden Seeder, "a native crypto project… taking the mechanics of the blockchain as the subject matter of the work", with Struggle for Pleasure, where the works are on IPFS "and so to some extent they are also on-chain" and the software will be made public, but "all the steps I took after that were once in a lifetime, I would not be able to reproduce them. I think blockchain can be a medium, in particular, the unique possibility of it is immutability. We didn't have that before the blockchain. Projects can have varying degrees of immutability, and this project is more about the particular image."

Artists he names

See also