Interface Gallery together with Nguyen Wahed presents Senescenence, a solo exhibition by Harm van den Dorpel. The exhibition brings together a body of generative animations built upon a cellular automaton in the tradition of Conway's Game of Life, where a minimal set of rules gives rise to extraordinary complexity, and where death is not failure but the system's natural feature. Alongside the screen-based works, the exhibition also includes a series of plotter drawings on paper — tracing the same generative logic into an anachronistic register.
The title, Senescenence, is an intentional recursive misspelling of "senescence," the term for the gradual aging or deterioration of living systems, often associated with the browning of fallen leaves.
Stained Unravel is a cellular automaton series in the tradition of Conway's Game of Life — but a different system category. Where Conway prescribes a minimal set of rules to determine if a cell lives or dies, Stained Unravel has an extended vocabulary: 23 morphological states cells can inhabit, operated on by three mechanisms that produce birth, survival, and death as consequences rather than rules (→ 2000, 2001).
The Senescenence exhibition presents the work in two forms, shown together at Nguyen Wahed (in collaboration with Interface Gallery): the animated NFT series, where the cellular automaton runs in real time on screen; and plotter drawings on paper, which trace outputs of the same generative logic into a different medium. These two forms are distinct executionally — the animated work renders its geometric shapes directly; the plotter drawings require a separate set of algorithms that convert those shapes into hatching, because a plotter can only draw lines.
The works emerge from Van den Dorpel's ongoing research into the foundations of generative art: from the binary logic of the weaving loom, to early two-dimensional pixel graphics, to the contemporary GPU, where millions of cells can live, die, and transform simultaneously in real time. At each technological threshold, the capacity for complexity expands beyond full human control. The visual language draws on traditions that understand pattern as more than ornamentation. References to Anni Albers' textiles, Buddhist mandalas, and stained-glass windows evoke rule-based systems in which local decisions accumulate into forms that exceed their individual construction. In these systems, structure becomes a carrier of meaning. This aligns with a much older cross-cultural intuition: that geometry is not merely descriptive but generative. Within traditions of sacred geometry, structure and spirit are intertwined rather than opposed. Van den Dorpel approaches the algorithm with this mindset, not simply as a tool of expression, but as a system set into motion to allow unforeseen forms to emerge beyond the artist's direct control. The works are less composed than initiated; what appears on screen is not fully designed, but permitted.
Each cell exists only in relation to its neighbours, recursively and conditionally. Nothing endures. The patterns that surface are temporary negotiations with impermanence, and the work resists any attempt at final resolution.