The Generative Threshold

A hub for three lines that run across the practice, each developed on its own page. The wiki's thesis is Does a Work Still Need to Be New?.

The threshold

The practice keeps returning to one point: a rule the artist sets runs, and what comes back was not designed by him. The Senescenence press release (2026) puts it in one sentence: "The works are less composed than initiated; what appears on screen is not fully designed, but permitted." It locates the threshold historically as well: "At each technological threshold, the capacity for complexity expands beyond full human control." The April 2026 draft text on Stained Unravel adds that "the initial vision is not executed so much as tested against what the process reveals" (draft). The rule and the choosing stay with the artist; the run supplies what neither of them planned.

1. Taste made explicit

Brian Droitcour reads the practice in three stages: personal taste as negative selection in Dissociations (2010; the mechanism is in 952 and on About); taste externalised as a fitness function in Death Imitates Language (2016), Hybrid Vigor (2017), Nested Exchange and Mutant Garden; and taste as system in Quantizer (2025), where the rules themselves become the material (→ Protocol, Taste, and Systems; the fitness functions are on Evolutionary Logic). Stained Unravel (2026) adds a rule that runs on its own previous states.

Agent's reading: the criterion travels in a loop

Thesis. The May 2026 version of this page read the sequence as one trajectory: each step pushed the composing hand further from the result, toward "the point where the rule runs the hand rather than the other way around".

Antithesis. Since 2024 the hand has come back: Kapitulation, the Beads, and the Entfaltung drawings, where, in the artist's statement, "The plotter lays down the construction, and my hand does the work Kunz's hand did" (→ Entfaltung on Paper). With the language model he leaves the code to the machine and keeps the choosing (→ Does a Work Still Need to Be New?). Stained Unravel keeps its intermediate states and curates a selection from them, so the hand also comes after the run (→ Process Legibility).

Synthesis. What moved outward was the procedure. The criterion stayed with the artist, and it returns to the hand whenever the procedure gets faster: "The code informed the drawings, and the drawings informed the code." The line is a feedback loop between system and hand, not a path away from the hand (→ Meditative Labour, Agent's reading: the hand inside the loop).

2. Compression and decompression

Randomness and Pattern sets Mondrian's grid, which reduces a tree to geometric essentials, against generative art, which runs the other way: a short rule unfolds into complexity at the scale of the pixel. The artist draws the consequence for the Resolution Paintings, mostly photographic exposures on metallic paper, in his text for Our Inner Child (2023): "any kind of screen display reduces visual complexity, therefore the only way these works could truly convey their full complexity was to produce them as material objects." In the 2021 conversation with Jenna Sutela he describes DNA as a program that makes a tree's leaves without encoding each one, and stops when the leaves are small enough (→ Harm van den Dorpel & Jenna Sutela). The wiki reads compression and recursion as one operation seen from two ends (→ Recursion and Self-Reference, Quantization and Dithering).

3. The loom and the rule

The Senescenence press release traces his research "from the binary logic of the weaving loom, to early two-dimensional pixel graphics, to the contemporary GPU" (→ Senescenence, The Grid). Along that line the rule separates from the hand. In weaving the rule and the hand are one practice. The Anni program writes the rule as code and "scans and builds from top left to bottom right in reference to the process of weaving" (harm.work). Stained Unravel lets the rule act on its own previous outputs. The women whose work he has researched since 2019, Anni Albers, Vera Molnár, Charlotte Posenenske and Tauba Auerbach, and since 2026 Emma Kunz, are the lineage he continues (→ Algorithmic Archaeology, Angles Morts). The page reads this as continuation of a computational logic centuries old, in line with the thesis.

Memory across timescales

22 years: the hand-picked palette of pure blue, green, magenta and a grey scale, first used in Markov's Window (2004) (→ The Markov's Dream Palette).
seconds: Stained Unravel's staining, where colour records how long a cell has kept its form (→ Stained Unravel).
two centuries: the loom lineage since Jacquard (1804) (→ Senescenence).

The Markov's Dream text sets the memoryless Markov process against people: "Human beings are creatures of memory, creatures of language." The palette is the work's own case of that memory.