Mark Dorf
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Homecoming
Projected 4k Video (Color, Sound)
Dimensions Variable
16 min 17 sec, 2024
Homecoming is a 16-minute cinematic work that reimagines Homer’s The Odyssey as a contemporary exploration of the concept of home for a civilization wholly repositioned by algorithmic technology and environmental uncertainty. The work interrogates how communication technologies have both reshaped and obscured our perceptions of the world, simultaneously creating hyperconnectivity and deep alienation. The installation hybridizes digital media, animation, appropriated internet imagery, and sonic landscape, resulting in a sensorial, immersive journey.
As a cinematic poem, Homecoming mirrors the Odyssean homeward journey, presenting a counterpoint: the contemporary longing for ‘home’ is complicated by modern anxieties, represented in relentless visual torrents. Homecoming turns its gaze to distortions within our compromised understanding of a relational reality—ecological, emotional, and sociological. it shifts our attention to the forces driving these perceptual contortions: both algorithmic design and an unprecedented influx of media.
Homecoming reflects a culture confused about its notion of home, lost in a manic recollection that renders itself inert. Through a turbulent edit, the film urges a reconsideration of what it means to belong in a time—and to a planet—where ‘home’ feels increasingly intangible. Here, the journey is no longer an Odyssean return to a place or a psychological state, but a reckoning with the futility of longing for impressions of home that may have only ever been mirages. Both destabilizing and destabilized, Homecoming interrogates the expectations imposed by these uncertain memories, confronting the impossibility of returning to a home that no longer exists—or perhaps never did.