Mark von Rosenstiel is a multi-disciplinary artist using mathematical algorithms that interact with and explore human relationships and emotions. Through feedback loops and technology he strives to reveal the middle ground people occupy -- the undeniably human place where truth is agonizingly close, but never touched. Mark’s site specific installations create internalized representations of the human experience that explore the boundary between observation and participation.

Mark’s work has been featured in galleries across the globe, from Seattle to Bangkok. He lectures on ideas of incompleteness, randomness, and scale variance in relation to art practice and the potential to discover truths by creative means. 

When I was a kid, I used to worry a lot about absolute truth. There were no gray areas in my head only right and wrong, true or false, on or off. I would pester my mom continuously about the exact place I was before birth. It wasn’t a spiritual question I was asking, but one of how my presence extended on either side of the conscious timeline;
a question of logistics and continuity. Luckily my need for absolutes has shifted, and with this shift I have found an approach to my practice that allows me to pursue the creation of objects that play with the space between the relative and the absolute. The space where the parts of us that truly make us human, live.

This shift was spearheaded by my background in mathematics and an idea within the field: incompleteness. The basic idea is that any structured system will contain within it the elements to create a question that the system can’t answer. In frameworks of knowledge this is a big deal. It means we will never come to maintain a complete body of knowledge, only an evolving one.

We as people, are systems in ourselves. The I is a system; a biological system with operations like addition and subtraction, but we give these operations different names like intuition and creativity. We shape and maintain an image of ourselves using these operations on the building blocks of our current mind. These building blocks are ideas that build to a certain truth. From this truth buds new ideas and new theorems, which we allow to hold a temporary absolute of the world. A cycle faking an absolute outcome. Through our lives we continue to build on our truth, combining these ideas until we come to a point where the idea we are presented with lacks clarity. It’s as if we have been able to ask a question without a clear language on how to answer it. These are not questions like, “Where is
the closest grocery store?” -- something unknown, but available for discovery -- but a question like, “How did I know my first love?” At these moments we must encapsulate our current self in a new self. We must augment and evolve; we must let go of what we once found to be certain. And we do this through tools created through culture: science, religion, and art.

It is in these moments of self-evolution that our facts and absolutes are shown for what they are: beliefs that we stopped needing to reaffirm; statements that we have lived with for so long without question that we have forgotten they were built from arbitrary parts. The books of our knowledge -- books lining the creases of our brain -- are continually torn apart, glued together, thrown out, or penned anew. Characters added. Plots re-imagined. Knowledge is nothing more than the web of these stories; ideas woven and locked together. A tapestry of bias and belief.

I see my practice as having two purposes: as a way to explore structures of knowledge and also as a way to bring people in touch with their own created belief, allowing them to emotionally connect to themselves. We can not come to understand our purpose in life without a profound understanding of the fluidity inherent in the way we perceive ourselves and the space we fill; the way we create meaning from certain internal rules. We must strive to experience moments where we can hold the image of ourselves in the mirror of the beliefs that underlie our truths.

These moments are opportunities to celebrate the ability for our truth to make us feel complete, while also knowing that this same truth will eventually lead us to become aware of our incompleteness. And if we are brought to realize these moments in the right way, we will not struggle and try to validate what we already know, but we will move to become who we are meant to be in that moment. An acceptance of this cycle is a love of Self.

What I hope for is that others will see what I make as I do: mathematically influenced environments to examine our emotional relationships to ourselves and our environment.