Harm van den Dorpel included in auction Softimage Poetics to support X-TRA

Harm van den Dorpel is included in the benefit auction Softimage Poetics to support X-TRA, Los Angeles’ longest running contemporary art journal of artists’ writing and criticism on its 25th anniversary.

Van den Dorpel is included in this online benefit auction with two new works from the Mutant Garden series. Reserves are set to the birth year of Ada Lovelace (1.815 ETH). 

While we might not always know the specifics of how a softimage is made (whether through machine learning and neural networks, generative software, simulation, or graphic editing), we can recognize one when we see it: morphing, gooey, lush, emergent, evolving and adaptive, an image ever in-between one state and the next. The softimage refuses stability; it feels alive. The artists gathered reflect on the significance of softimages, a concept coined and theorized by Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie, which dominate the algorithmically-generated image landscape we navigate online. Each work foregrounds the artistic narratives and stories of generative images, the field of frenzied political and social activity around them, and their strange poetics.

Softimage Poetics is an auction Curated by Nora N. Khan.

View the auction here.

Publication date: 17 Feb '23