Origin of a Made Place

Window Ryan Lee Gallery is pleased to present Origin of a Made Place, a video installation in RLWindow by Mark Dorf depicting roses shot at the Portland International Rose Test Garden that have been processed through “inverse diffusion,” a process that can be considered the reverse of traditional AI image generation. Presented as a four channel video, the rose images in the video fluctuate between the noise from which the photograph could have emerged through AI image generation and the photograph that is its source. The wall vinyl portrays a Photo Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU) variance map, a forensic fingerprint of the specific camera sensor that made these images, a process often used in determining whether an image is AI generated or produced by a photosensitive sensor. Roses are among the most genetically controlled species in human history. The Portland International Rose Test Garden came to be in 1917 when Portland, OR offered sanctuary for rose varieties endangered by World War I, its beginnings rooted in the imperial politics that determined which species were deemed cultural heritage worth saving. To this day, the garden is a testing ground for new hybridization, producing the bloated floral forms that define rose culture across the world. A similar structure is at work in contemporary AI image platforms. Just as roses have been bred into a cartoon-like version of themselves, image generation platforms create feedback loops of homogenized imagery in the name of socio-political ideologies, silently employing a public to create and distribute its image. A rose that an AI image generator produces is overdetermined three times: first by the centuries of hybridization that shaped the flower, next by every visual representation of that flower, and finally by the intentions of the platform generating its image. The title is a reference to the 1960 poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” by Robert Duncan. It is a poem about a place that is made in one’s unconscious, a place of perpetual return whose existence depends on an act of imagination, choice, perception, and memory. Origin of a Made Place takes on a similar tension, asking where images come from, and finding that like the meadow, and like the rose, the origin itself is a construction wielded by an author. Mark Dorf is a New York-based artist working across photography, video, digital media, and sculpture. Engaging collaboratively with ecologists and technologists, Dorf’s work questions perceptions of what Western culture often terms “nature.” His images and objects examine how design, image culture, technology, and science shape expectations of the “natural” world, while engaging deeply with the digital processes behind their production. His work can be found in the collections of Deutsche Bank, Fidelity Investments, Foam Photography Museum, The Houston Center for Photography, and the RISD Museum, along with numerous private collections. Additionally, Dorf’s books are available in renowned libraries internationally, including Avery Library at Columbia University, Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University, and The Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.