The dendritic formations on certain limestone and marble surfaces — the dark branching patterns produced by manganese oxide deposits following the fracture lines of the stone — look like asemic script. They look, more specifically, like a kind of writing that a non-human intelligence might produce if it were attempting to communicate something about the structure of diffusion, of branching, of the paths that fluids take through porous material under pressure.
The stone is not writing. This much is clear. But what is the correct response to a surface that has organized itself into patterns that the human visual system cannot distinguish from intentional mark-making? Is the appropriate response to ignore the resemblance, on the grounds that attribution of meaning to a geological process is a category error? Or is the resemblance itself data — evidence that the forms the hand reaches for are not invented but recovered from the material world, which was already making them before any hand arrived?
I do not have an answer to this. I have several works that began as responses to dendritic formations, and I find them among the most interesting in the archive.