Harm van den Dorpel – Emergent Conclusions

14 November 2014 – 10 January 2015

VIEW EXHIBITION: room.thecomposingrooms.com/02

Harm van den Dorpel's four works; Showreel, Strategies, The Four Master Tropes, all recently 'reframed' for web, and Deep Tissue are exhibited together here for the first time, showing their emergent conclusions.

Throughout the works a vast range of material; image, sound and text, are combined to the effect of an ‘equalised hierarchy’. All works are described as 'Pseudo Generative' employing generative software, designed by the artist to create initial organisation of content, before being heavily manually and intuitively edited.

The visual content of Showreel, 2009, was derived from experiments with a screen capture software which posted images directly to a website. The software was developed by Van den Dorpel and used by him and a group of friends like a surf club. Upon recognising an associative narrative, showreel became an anthropological investigation, as well as a documentation of the  process of making sculptures, the 3–d renders of which also appear in the video.

Strategies, 2010  a sequel to showreel, documents the process of making two collages. Screenshots, images and other found footage were collected over the course of two months and combined with rewritten phrases of advice given by business experts, martial arts gurus, software developers and Jacques Derrida. The background track was made by Van den Dorpel in 2002 and was never used before, for anything particular.

The Four Master Tropes, 2011 reflects the artist's ambivalent engagement with, and occasional misreading of, contemporary philosophy gathered via Kindle highlights. These are presented as YouTube annotations as layered on top of artwork created by users from the social network deviantart.com, which foreground ‘destabilised’ photographs of Van den Dorpel's studio. A jarring piece of music, made by Van den Dorpel in 2002 plays as the soundtrack.

Deep Tissue, 2014 serves as one possible conclusion to Dissociations (dissociations.com) before Van den Dorpel moved on to his next project Deli Near Info (delinear.info/harmvddorpel). Dissociations is a site programmed to inform associations between the artist's materials and his past/present/future artworks, and also acts as a live studio.

Harm van den Dorpel, 1981, The Netherlands. Solo exhibitions include; Neumeister Bar-Am, Berlin; American Medium, New York City; and Young Projects, Los Angeles (all upcoming 2015); Release Early, Release Often (...), Abrons Arts Center, New York City (2013); About – Wilkinson Gallery, London; Watch the Throne – Grouphab.it, Berlin and The Mews Project Space, London (all 2012). Recent group exhibitions include; Private Settings – Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; The Moving Museum, Istanbul; In Its Image – American Medium, New York City; Art Post Internet – Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Surplus Living, KM Temporaer, Berlin and The New Beauty of Our Modern Life – Higher Pictures, New York City (all 2014).

Van den Dorpel studied Time Based Arts, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam graduating in 2006 and Artificial Intelligence, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, graduating in 2002.