Harm van den Dorpel
Quantizer
August, 2025
This August, SOLOS presents Quantizer, the latest body of work by Harm van den Dorpel and his second exhibition with the programme, following Struggle for Pleasure in early 2024. Conceived and refined over the past year, the series continues his engagement with generative systems and algorithmic processes, code as a medium for both thought and image.
An important voice in Post-Internet Art, Harm has been part of shaping the field for over a decade. He established the online platform Club Internet in 2008, and later founded left gallery, which between 2015 and 2022 experimented with selling “downloadable objects.” Across these ventures, and throughout his artistic practice, he has sought to design programs that yield aesthetic systems of emergent complexity, structures that not only evolve but provoke philosophical reflection on our relationship with the internet and digital culture.
In Quantizer, the pace is deliberate. Harm works against the culture of instant consumption, instead inviting viewers to linger, to watch images change slowly over time. The work draws from his long-standing fascination with impermanence, shaped in part by the Tibetan Buddhist practice of sand mandalas: intricate compositions created over days or weeks, only to be swept away in a ceremonial gesture of release. The gesture acknowledges the inevitability of change, a sentiment Harm reinterpreted in the context of Web3 by favouring flux over fixity.
The title refers to quantization, an algorithmic process that converts continuous information into discrete units. In this series, the term functions doubly: as a technical descriptor of the generative logic at play, and as a poetic shorthand for the beauty of precision, the elegance of working within limits. Dithering, once essential to early digital graphics, appears here as both an aesthetic device and a conceptual anchor. The palettes, drawn from computing history, recall the chromatic signatures of systems like the IBM CGA and ZX Spectrum. Each work begins with a set of parameters determined at mint, forming a “grammar” of shapes and rules. From there, Ethereum block hashes act as seeds, triggering new compositions every twelve seconds. The system has no memory: each image is independent, a singular expression in an ongoing sequence. Gaussian noise and dithering give these transitions a fluid continuity, while the blockchain ensures a shared viewing experience, identical in every location.
While the logic recalls earlier blockchain experiments such as Mutant Garden Seeder (2021), where mutations accumulated over time, the mechanics here are entirely different. Harm’s use of blockchain in art dates back to Event Listeners (2015), the first blockchain-authenticated artwork acquired by a museum (the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, MAK).
In Quantizer, the viewer never arrives at a finished image. Instead, the work exists in perpetual transformation. For Harm, this refusal of finality is essential: “The most interesting aspect of generative digital art is that it is inherently unstable and ever changing. This is a quality I want to retain, so I resist arriving at immutable outputs.” Quantizer takes this ethos further, asking for patience, attention, and stillness, not in the service of spectacle, but to approach something quieter, more elemental.
Bio
Harm van den Dorpel is an artist dedicated to discovering emergent aesthetics by composing software and language, borrowing from disparate fields such as genetics and blockchain.
Van den Dorpel's work has been exhibited in the collections of, among others, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, MAK Vienna, Victoria & Albert Museum London, and ZKM Karlsruhe. Selected (group) exhibitions include the New...