Animated GIF 800 x 600 px, 24fps 128 Colors 2022

The works from Mark Dorf’s series "The Way We’ve Always Seen" uncover connections between technology, design, urbanism, and what is commonly considered “Nature”—connections that have always existed in symbiosis, but are rarely recognized as reality.

In Resolution, the viewer is met with a black and white mountainous scene whose contours drip with color aberrations. This disruption lays bare the false dichotomy of black and white, and by extension, the false dichotomy of technology and what is considered the “Natural World”. Within the digital space, even images of black and white are built from pixels of red, green, and blue. In Resolution, this acts as a metaphor for the multitude contained within the complex spectrum of knowledge and experience that we all exist within.

Complicating this notion of the spectrum is the central graphic form—a resolution target used to calibrate camera sensors and scanners—that consistently appears and disappears in varying scales throughout the duration of the animation. It flickers as though it cannot lock onto its target. In this moment, technology is failing—It cannot quantify the image that it finds itself within. This failure however means not to perpetuate and create hierarchies, but rather to reveal that some vocabularies are not translatable; that some vocabularies are perhaps not meant to be decoded.