Mark Dorf
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Emergence
2014
As human beings, we are driven by a deep desire to decode our surroundings—to give form to the unknown. Across history, we have searched for meaning in religion, in the stars, and in the observable patterns of the natural world. The scientific method is one process in particular that helps shape this pursuit, allowing for the identification of structures and correlations that deepen an understanding of the world. However, scientific theories and datasets are not mirror images of reality—they are interpretations, predictions, and translations. Like works of art, they are abstractions filtered through human perception.
Emergence takes influence from the intersection between sensory experience and scientific abstraction. It considers how vast datasets and analytical systems, though built on approximation, can generate novel modes of seeing—illuminating phenomena that would otherwise remain imperceptible. Yet these systems, like asymptotic curves, only approach reality without ever fully arriving at it. Objective truth remains an unreachable limit: no matter how refined the data or precise the method, reality itself recedes into an ever-smaller gap, infinitely divisible but never fully resolved.
In this way, the project embraces science not as a source of certainty, but as a generative framework for wonder, speculation, and expanded vision—one that reveals not only what we know, but the beautiful and persistent distance between knowing and being.
The production of Emergence was supported by the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory and the National Science Foundation.
Additional images available upon request.
Selected Exhibitions
201 7 Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta, GA
2016 Metronom Gallery, Modena, Italy
2016 Galerie Philine Cremer, Düsseldorf, Germany
2016 University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
2016 Flowers Gallery, New York, NY
2015 Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY
Selected Publications
2017 ARCH + - Issue No. 228
2016 Foam Magazine - Issue No. 44
2016 Translations - Monograph - Ain't Bad Editions
2015 Magenta Foundation - Flash Forward
2015 Granta Magazine - No. 131
2015 Emergence - Artist Book - In the In-Between