Harm van den Dorpel

Biography

Harm van den Dorpel was born in 1981 in Zaandam, the Netherlands, and lives and works in Berlin. He studied artificial intelligence, then taught creative programming and interaction design at private training centres and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 2006 to 2010. He is widely considered a key figure of Post-Internet art. His practice spans sculpture, collage, computer animation, computer-generated graphics, software and interaction design. He uses algorithms to analyse digital archives and to guide aesthetic decisions, setting up a collaboration between artist and machine. His references include psychoanalysis, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and research into artificial intelligence. In 2015 he co-founded Left Gallery in Berlin. In 2015 the MAK, Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, acquired his screensaver work Event Listeners, which made it the first museum to buy an artwork with bitcoin. In 2016 he received the net-based art award of the House of Electronic Arts Basel. His work has been shown at institutions including the New Museum in New York, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Museum Kurhaus Kleve and the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam, and in project spaces and galleries in Berlin, London, New York and Los Angeles. At Paris Photo 2026 he is part of Scenography, the group presentation by Automata in the Digital Sector, where Automata describes his practice as focused on emergent systems, feedback loops and approaches to AI.