His work is concerned with excavating the culture-shaping role of the internet, which he described as an “ecosystem of live objects that interact,” and investigating the power of algorithms to sort through, analyze and prioritize digital archives and take initiative in decision making. He has said that “net art” that takes the form of established media (sculpture, collage, etc) is obsolete; accordingly, his own output equates the novelty of its subject with the novelty of its medium (the vessel should be as new as the content it discusses.) Human and machine influences join hands to mould the aesthetic of his projects, which take the form of websites or “algorithmic studios” with randomly-selected, changing slideshows of images or as multimedia works for galleries. His non-linear platforms Dissociations and deli near info dissect the internet’s value systems by “reflect[ing] on how temporality affects relevance in the stacked perceptual field of social media streams” (Rhizome). Van den Dorpel has shown works at the New Museum in New York, Young Projects in Los Angeles,  the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam.

Van den Dorpel started Left Gallery, a Berlin-rooted online contemporary art gallery that commissions, produces, and sells downloadable files.