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NET ART
ANTHOLOGY

Death Imitates Language

Harm van den Dorpel

2016 - ongoing

About 100,000 digital paintings are tiled in the online gallery of Death Imitates Language, representing the cumulative output of a computer-driven composition system initiated by artist Harm van den Dorpel in 2016. Beginning with a single, original pair of images—a nongendered “Adam & Eve”—the system “breeds” images together iteratively to create possible new compositions.

Van den Dorpel then reviews the results, excising some aesthetic expressions and encouraging others, like a breeder selecting favorable traits; some images are also produced physically for gallery exhibition. Even in physical form, the works resist classification as singular objects: transparent, layered, and fluid in composition, they appear as frozen moments from larger dynamic systems and ecologies.

Harm van den Dorpel, Death Imitates Language, 2016–ongoing. Mobile Website. Screenshot, 2018, Google Chrome 70 on Android 8.1.

“I’m trying to make systems that reverse engineer my implicit or unconscious ideas of what I want to achieve.”

— Harm van den Dorpel

VISIT WORK

Genetic biology serves as the organizing metaphor of Death Imitates Language. According to van den Dorpel, the system generates images “by inheriting sequences of information—a sort of DNA—from its ancestors.”

On the project website, clicking on a double-helix symbol hovering over each painting calls up an ID card that lists aspects of this DNA: the specimen’s name, its “parents” (linked by a heart icon), age, view count, and pedigree-related tags including “only child,” “3 siblings,”“8 children,” and “virgin.”

Death Imitates Language, 2016. Mobile Website. Screenshot, 2018, Google Chrome 70 on Android 8.1.

Once van der Dorpel determines that a painting has reached the “optimal state” of its particular aesthetic, it is “frozen” and placed in a separate gallery, which currently contains thirty-two works.

Some of these have been produced physically as multilayered UV prints on CNC-cut plexiglass with inlaid packaging foil.

Death Imitates Language, 2016. Screenshot, 2019, Google Chrome on Mac OS 10.12.

Harm van den Dorpel, Yaroslavalavrova Kochan Xutizekea, 2016. Multilayered UV prints with white channel on CNC-cut, laser polished plexiglas.

Rather than seeing these as the sole finished objects, van der Dorpel conceives of the algorithm itself as part of the piece, and as a part of the complex and dynamic system of his artistic practice.

Installation view, Harm van den Dorpel, “Death Imitates Language,” Neumeister Bar­Am, Berlin, November 26, 2016– February 4, 2017.

To illustrate the process, van den Dorpel created a related work in which members of the public can make their own combinations of images. In that project, Hybrid Vigor (2017), visitors to the project website may select pairs of images yields a new population based on their shared traits.

Thus, the website moves toward a narrower selection of traits. As the diversity of the images narrows, the evolutionary process breaks down, illustrating one pitfall with this type of “genetic” manipulation.

Hybrid Vigor. Screenshot, 2019, Google Chrome v72 on Mac OS 10.12.

Hybrid Vigor. Screenshot, 2019, Google Chrome v72 on Mac OS 10.12.

More From CHAPTER 4: 2011-2016

08/24/18 Untitled/Clefa Devin Kenny 2013
08/31/18 Image Objects Artie Vierkant 2011 - ongoing
09/14/18 Ethira Amalia Ulman 2013
11/16/18 Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #1: Constituting an Outside (Utopian Plagiarism) Zach Blas 2015
11/30/18 I'm Here and There Jonas Lund 2011
02/14/19 Sister Unn’s Bunny Rogers & Filip Olszewski 2011 - 2012
02/05/19 Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom K-hole & Box 1824 2013
02/08/19 Consciousness Engine 2: absentfatherbot Bogosi Sekhukhuni 2013
02/19/19 Material Speculation: Isis Morehshin Allahyari 2015 - 2016
03/12/19 I’m that angel Tyler Coburn 2011 - ongoing
03/21/19 /INB4/ Liz Mputu & /inb4/ 2014 - ongoing
03/21/19 #PAYBLACKTiME RaFia Santana 2016 - ongoing
05/10/19 Psycho Nymph Exile Porpentine Charity Heartscape 2016 - 2017
05/17/19 Image Atlas Taryn Simon with Aaron Swartz 2012 - ongoing
05/17/19 Mexiconceptual H̶E̶R̶I̶B̶E̶R̶T̶O̶ Y̶é̶p̶e̶z̶ (Satélite) 2016
06/30/19 Daily Times (Performer) Siebren Versteeg 2012
06/30/19 AGNES Cécile B. Evans 2013 - 2014
06/04/19 DIS Images DIS (LAUREN BOYLE, SOLOMON CHASE, MARCO ROSO, DAVID TORO, AND COLLABORATORS) 2013
06/30/19 The Game: The Game Angela Washko 2016 - 2019

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