Mark Dorf

A New Nature, 2021

4K digital video, color, sound, 10:15 min.

This video work presents an environment of what a future nature might look like.he viewer is presented with visual and aural considerations about the future of what Western culture refers to as Nature. The future depicted here is not one steeped in doom and gloom as Hollywood so often does, nor is the utopian perfection that Silicon Valley so wishes us to believe can exist. A New Nature depicts a future that is both cautionary and celebratory, offering entry to a hybrid natural world, augmented with technology. With mysteries laying around every corner, this future is inhabited by hybrid planetary systems of ‘technology-organisms,’ at once beautiful and abject. This work was created in collaboration with and supported by the Rocky Mountain Biological Research Laboratory and National Science Foundation Grant.

Mark Dorf is a New York based artist whose practice utilizes photography, video, digital media, and sculpture. Often working directly with ecologists and technologists in the production of his works, Dorf is influenced by human’s perceptions of and interactions with what we call “Nature”, urbanism, design, and virtual environments. As opposed to seeing these subjects as categorically separate, Dorf reveals their entanglement and integration with one another as an inclusive and lively planetary ecology.