Mark Dorf
Works, Bio/CV, ContactNewsletter
Parallels2013
Parallels is a series of self-portraits as animated GIFs that explore the slippages between digital representation and embodied experience. The work emerged from a growing sense of dissonance—when the boundary between online culture and a physical reality felt increasingly unstable, collapsing into something both uncanny and irreversible.
Digital technology has not merely replicated the world, but translated it—adding a material experience into a parallel system with its own codes, rhythms, and aesthetics. And yet, this parallel is not separate: the digital and the physical do not stand in opposition, but continuously shape one another. Parallels swims in this murky convergence—a space where tactile presence and pixelated projection blur into one another.
These looping animations operate as unstable reflections—self-portraits that register the tension of inhabiting multiple layers at once, where identity, gesture, and time fold into repetition, compression, and distortion. They mark an early point in an ongoing collapse—not of worlds into each other, but of the idea that they were ever truly apart.
Coding in collaboration with Adam Ferris / Commissioned by Neverland Space
Selected Exhibitions
2020 Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Mobile, AL
2014 Neverland Space (online)