"Harm van den Dorpel's Subdued Iconoclasm" — ZORA ZINE

Publication: ZORA ZINE, 20 December 2021
Source: Harm van den Dorpel's Subdued Iconoclasm

Overview

A profile with interview quotes, framed by the Studio Bonn panel "To Whom Does Art Belong" at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, where van den Dorpel sat with Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi, and Clémentine Deliss, with Kolja Reichert moderating. The interview took place a few weeks before the panel. It covers his biography (Zaandam, computer science and AI, art school, a period in New York, Ascribe in Berlin), Event Listeners at the MAK Vienna, left gallery, Mutant Garden, psychoanalysis and theology, and plans for Death Imitates Language on-chain.

Key points

1. Not revolution

"Some people have a more revolutionary approach where they say, 'Fuck the old system, we are going to just start from scratch.' But that is really not my attitude." His alternative is a positive one: "I think all the arts are digital nowadays. So I think we should stop making this distinction, which also means stop making a distinction between digital art and art in a physical brick-and-mortar gallery." Later he adds: "I find that brick-and-mortar galleries are still extremely important… They have clients; they store work; they sell it."

The phrase "subdued iconoclasm" appears only in the headline; the text never explains it. Where the wiki places his stance among New/Old and Different/Same is settled on The Semiotic Square. The zine's own account of his value is "giving that one extra push, that sliver of confidence, to enlist those who still aren't convinced".

2. Taxes and ownership

At the panel he raised taxes: "it's still completely unclear what this means for taxes… Who owns and who pays taxes? Is a smart contract a company?" He had spent three months researching it with lawyers and accountants, "unwantedly", and it "also made me think a lot about the metaphysical meaning of ownership." The zine remarks how rarely NFT panels discuss "the un-sexy topic of taxes and regulation". The wiki follows ownership as a chain of mediations on Mediation and the Archive.

3. Theology, Jung and the unconscious

"I am fascinated by psychoanalysis." The zine adds that he had read Carl Jung on the religions, rituals and fantasies of different cultures, and that "these empirical models stood in contrast to his own upbringing."
"I'm coming from a very strong religious background. My father has run a church at some point; theology has always been in my life."
"Theology is interpreting scripture or deciphering language. As a literary writer, you have power by creating worlds; when you're a coder, you write conditions; and with generative art, you are, on the one hand, a creator, and [because] you cannot fully prepare yourself for what is coming out of this algorithm…you're also a bystander."
"By creating conditions that have certain outputs that are not fully predictable, I think you can even say that the unconscious is manifested through that."

The last two quotes are the interview's contribution to Subconscious Computation, the home of the creator/bystander parallel. He hedges the second himself ("I think you can even say"). Theology, writing and coding stand side by side in his sentence as parallels; the wiki's further reading, that the generative artist stands somewhat as a negative theologian before what he cannot specify, is on Apophatic Theology.

4. The object-driven art world

"It was pretty unclear as a digital artist, how to relate to the art world, which used to be very, and still is, object-driven." At one point, he says, "I thought I should never try to live off the arts and just be, on one hand, an inventor or software developer."

5. Event Listeners and the MAK

In 2015 the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna bought twenty editions of Event Listeners, originally an edition of one hundred, paying in Bitcoin. The zine calls the MAK "the first institution in history to purchase a digital artwork with Bitcoin" and places the purchase "in association with Ascribe"; his essay Tokenising Sustainability says it went through the marketplace Cointemporary. "Then, because of this institutional recognition, all one hundred sold out; that was the first encounter with crypto resulting in some financial gain." The purchase came before left gallery and led to it (→ left gallery).

Token 2 shows overlapping white octagon outlines on black, with the line "it's not allowed to feel comfortable" set in italic serif.

6. left gallery and the second wave

After the MAK purchase he founded left gallery with Paloma Rodríguez Carrington, in the zine's words "an artist-and-curated run blockchain gallery, initially powered with Bitcoin"; it ran from 2015 to 2022. Of 2017 and 2018 he says: "there wasn't much interest in tokens, and especially in the art world, people were like, 'That was a nice fad.'" Then, in 2021: "I basically woke up one morning looking around and see the whole world trading NFTs for high prices." He had seen that enthusiasm once before, "on a smaller scale years ago, but then it stopped." The Spike #70 interview describes a similar rise and fall at the scale of internet art.

7. PFP projects and street art

On PFP projects: "I don't relate to it aesthetically, but I'm also not against it. I mean, I also don't like soccer, but it exists." They remind him "more of a cartoon world, or street art maybe; street art has a complicated relation to the gallery." The zine extends the comparison with its own history of graffiti and the 1980 Times Square Show (Basquiat, Holzer, Haring, Goldin), organised by downtown artists, not SoHo insiders. He adds that early NFTs were made and bought by people close to the technical side, and "I think we can already see NFTs are becoming more common to people who are not active in that space."

8. Open standards

"I hope we can maintain an open NFT ecosystem with well-described standards for metadata, making standards together and not ending up with an Amazon of NFTs, figuring out what it means to own an NFT." (→ Protocol, Taste, and Systems)

9. Death Imitates Language on-chain

He was revisiting Death Imitates Language (2016), whose genetic algorithm bred compositions from what he calls "chromosomes": "My chromosome was too long to store on-chain. It still hurts that I didn't do that back then, because crossbreeding NFTs, generating offspring, is very close to what CryptoKitties is." The plan was to bring it back fully on-chain: "It's 23,000 tokens, so it's a bit unclear if that should be an airdrop or very low price, but this is in the works." No source records that the release happened; the harm.work series page lists works up to Big Pablo Ferenc Zatlas (2021) (→ Death Imitates Language).

Works referenced

Event Listeners (2015) — twenty of its hundred editions bought by the MAK Vienna
Mutant Garden (2019–) — exhibition at Upstream Gallery Amsterdam in 2021, with the first 64 editions reserved for collectors; Cartesian Genetic Programming
Death Imitates Language (2016) — on-chain revival planned in 2021