Mark Dorf’s Surreal Mix of Photography & Digital Media

Axiom & Simulation by Mark Dorf.

Employing a mix of photography and digital media, New York City-based artist Mark Dorf explores the post-analogue experience – society’s interactions with the digital world and its relationship to our natural origins.

Dorf scrutinises and examines the influence of the information age through the combination of photography and digital media, looking at how we encounter, translate, and understand our surroundings through the filter of science and technology. Mark seeks to understand our curious habitation of the 21st century world through the juxtaposition of nature and the digital domain.

Path by Mark Dorf.

Path // In his Path series, Dorf harnesses the idea that there are very few moments in the modern Western World which are not influenced by digital technology and connectivity through the World Wide Web. Our personal devices are integrated into nearly every part of our lives affecting our social, emotional, and physical relationships. As technology translates and augments the human experience into a quantifiable, navigable, and cataloged language, we no longer log on or off, but rather create harmony living within the framework of technology and the Internet.

Transposition by Mark Dorf.

Transposition // Humans are drawn to categorise and compartmentalise our material existence: there is the landscape and there is the city; there is the digital and there is the physical; there is chaos and there is harmony. In our increasingly technological existence, this feeling is only perpetuated and amplified by the increased contrast to those areas that exist in our urban centres, the surrounding landscape in which they exist, and our technological environments. In actuality though none of these elements can exist in a singular fashion without influence from another. Transposition explores these perceived binaries not as opposites, but rather as a spectrum, revealing the complex influences between the languages of landscape, urbanity, and technology.

All works from Transposition were commissioned and supported by Fotograf Festival in Prague, CZ, 2016. Materials: Birch Plywood, Pine Stock, UV Print, Tempered Glass, Astroturf, Plexi-Glass, Fluorescent Lights, Concrete, Wood Chips, Resin.

Nebulous by Mark Dorf.

Nebulous // This series was informed by Rob Kitchen’s Continuous Geosurveillance in the ‘Smart City’ which states: “For the past couple of decades there has been a steady stream of analysis that has documented the ways in which the rollout of new digital and networked technologies have enabled increasingly pervasive and extensive forms of state and corporate surveillance. Such technologies have the capability to capture and communicate data about their use; simultaneously a wealth of sophisticated software has been developed that processes and acts on such data in automated, autonomous, and automatic ways. Importantly, the use of embedded GPS, sensors, and digital cameras are enabling location and movement to be tracked, facilitating extensive geosurveillance of people and places.”

Nebulous explores ideas of big data within the context of the contemporary urban environment. Our digital footprints and digital shadows are broadcast at all times – often unknowingly. Our digital devices create a perfect portrait of our consumption, motion, leisure, and communication. Nebulous creates an abstract portrait of our broadcasted clouds. The series was commissioned by DIS Magazine for “The Data Issue” for Rob Kitchin’s Continuous Geosurveillance in the “Smart City”.

Emergence by Mark Dorf.

Emergence // As human beings we have the innate desire to dissect our surroundings in order to better define the unknown. Historically, we have searched for our answers in religion, the stars, and in the observable phenomena of our natural world. In modern times, the scientific method aids us in revealing patterns that better our understanding of the world we live in. However, theories and collected data are only predictions and translations of the world around us. This calculated understanding of our environment is an abstraction of the reality that we experience with our senses rather than an objective truth. But it is through these abstractions that new information is revealed that would otherwise go unseen to the human eye.

All works from Emergence were supported by the Rocky Mountain Biological Research Laboratory.