Harm van den Dorpel

Mutant Garden Light Exposure prints (2022)

Harm van den Dorpel’s (1981, NL) broad practice includes sculpture, installation, works on paper, computer generated graphics and software. Rooted in the conceptual heritage of net.art, Van den Dorpel’s works often simulate neural networks. The role of technology in his works is a means to an end: a tool to increase the understanding of our experience.

For Harm van den Dorpel the tension between the relative simplicity of computational rules, and the enormous complexity in the outcome, holds the key to understanding life, and by extension, our aesthetic appreciation of it. People are attracted to visual systems which are to some extent complex, novel, and mysterious, yet at the same time contain familiar, repeating elements. Difference and variation, surprise and expectation, have provided essential building blocks in the history of human expression.

The light exposure prints Coralena (Mutation 105) and Coralena (Mutation 62), find their origin in van den Dorpel’s programmed Mutant Garden Software.

With the Mutant Garden software, the artist simulates natural structures that initially seem to be out of our hands and tries to make us connect with them. Clicking one rectangular ‘mutant’ will cause its siblings to be replaced with newly mutated offspring. This breeding strategy requires only one parent to be selected because the algorithm utilizes mutation, rather than cross-over.

Harm van den Dorpel

Coralena (Mutation 105), 2022

Exposure on light sensitive metallic paper, mounted and framed 125 x 110 cm

Edition of 1 plus 1 artist’s proof

Harm van den Dorpel

Coralena (Mutation 62), 2022

Exposure on light sensitive metallic paper, mounted and framed 125 x 110 cm

Edition of 1 plus 1 artist’s proof