D. Hartnett seeks to bring an ever-complexifying world into the framework of cognition using multimedia visual communication. The works are self-organising which variably means that the authorship of the work is dispersed within the idea of it. The outcome is often to imagine different social realities and new epistemologies that perhaps work more efficiently when authorless.

Situating their nonlinear practice at the intersection of art and fields like cybernetics, advertising, systems analysis, learning theory, communications, complexity, and computer technology, Hartnett has cultivated a collaborative, interactive, participatory approach rooted in simulating subjective experience through audience engagement with the fluid variables of social connections, contexts, and tangible realities always at play.

Rather than providing reductive, feed-forward resolution, their work allows for emergence and self-organisation, embracing emergent black-box thinking and toy theorems. Their calculatedly indefinite approach stands in contrast to more traditional art historical processes that fetishise linear, cause-and-effect reasoning to pursue definitive answers and conclusions.

The work is an infected abstraction, a creeping intrusion of alien conjecture into logic, an encroachment of theory that fundamentally alters the framework of decision-making beyond simple binary choices.