EXHIBITION DETAILS

Axiom and Simulation | Mark Dorf

August 8 - September 20, 2014

Artist Speaker Series 5 p.m., Friday, September 5, 2014

Artist Reception September 5, from 6-8 p.m.

Photographic artist Mark Dorf is a Brooklyn based artist who seeks to understand humanity as an observer in his surroundings, using digital media as a tool to explore the curious habitation of the world around us.

STATEMENT

AXIOM & SIMULATION examines the ways in which humans quantify our natural surroundings through the use of scientific and digital means. As a developed global culture, we are constantly transforming elements of our physical environment into abstracted non-physical calculations in order to gain a greater understanding of our complex surroundings. These transformations often take form through mathematical or scientific interpretations and as a result, the referent becomes a clouded and distant entity. When the calculated representation is compared to its real counterpart, an arbitrary and disconnected relationship is created in which there is very little or no physical or visual connection at all thus resulting in questions of definition – data vs. object and macroscopic vs. microscopic.

When observing a three dimensional rendering of a mountainside, it holds the familiar form to what we experience in nature, but has no physical connection to reality whatsoever – it is merely a file on a computer that has no mass and only holds likeness to a memory. Moving in even further, when translating the file into the most basic of computer programing codes, binary code, we see just 1’s and 0’s – a series of numbers creating representation from a language composed of only two elements that have no grounding in the natural world. These transformations generate, literally, a new reality – one without its original referent, a copy with no definitive source.

These planes of existence however, do run parallel to our own physical existence. These digital worlds are becoming ever present in our lives as technology continues to progress through math, science, personal computers, and the Internet. This transformation, manipulation, and breakdown of information is exactly what dilutes our primary understanding of the world we inhabit and inevitably leads us to create these new planes of existence and a digitally quantified perception.