Mark Dorf
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Origin of a Made Place
Four panel 4k Video (Color), Custom inverse-diffusion model, LED Lighting, Vinyl wall print,
26min 10sec Loop
Dimensions Variable
2026
Origin of a Made Place is composed of four monitors in a 2x2 array displaying video of roses shot at the Portland International Rose Test Garden, processed through locally run inverse diffusion, a process that can be considered the reverse of AI image generation. The rose images fluctuate between the noise from which the photograph could have emerged through AI image generation and the photograph that is its source. Behind the monitors is 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.
Globally and across cultures, 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. Still today 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 image representation of that flower, and finally by the intentions of the platform generating its image.
Through inverse diffusion each photograph is dissolved backward toward the latent space, reconstructing the precise steps a generative process would have taken to produce this photograph. The path is faithful to this specific image, but what the model perceives becomes increasingly unrecognizable. The rose both recedes into and emerges out of this gestational state from which a rose, or any number of other things, could have emerged, any vestige of origin wholly untethered.
The title Origin of a Made Place takes influence from Robert Duncan's 1960 poem 'Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow'. It is a poem about a place that is made in one’s unconscious, perhaps collectively. It is a made 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.
Selected Exhibitions
2026 Ryan Lee Gallery, New York, NY