Mark Dorf
Works, Bio/CV, ContactNewsletter
The Way We’ve Always Seen
2020 - 2021
The Way We’ve Always Seen explores the technological conditions that structure perception, treating the interface not just as a tool but as a worldview. The images in this body of work unfold as designed experiences—structured through the politics of mapping, the aesthetics of graphic design, and the coded frameworks that mediate our relationships to the world and one another. What is seen is always already formatted.
By expressing how contemporary representations of “Nature” are shaped by inherited visual systems, the work interrogates the false division between environment and interface. Each composition renders the world not as it “is”, but as it is processed—suggesting that this processing is a quality of the world itself. The resulting images do not depict landscapes; they expose “Nature” as a technological construct, continually shaped by the tools through which it is known.
Technology here is not an addition to vision, but its condition. From the pictorial depth of oil painting to the transparency of glass, from concrete’s modernist infrastructure to the abstraction of code, technologies have always acted as thresholds for experience—shaping perception, guiding behavior, and transforming the terms of engagement with the world. The interface is not a veil to be pulled back, but a structure that actively conditions reality. Rather than obscuring a so-called source, it produces a world in flux—where meaning, matter, and mediation are in constant negotiation. The Way We’ve Always Seen insists that there is no stable point of return. The image is never neutral, and perception has always been technological.
Additional works available upon request.
Selected Exhibitions
2024 Below Grand, New York, NY
2022 bitforms Gallery, New York, NY
2022 Public Works Administration, New York, NY
2021 Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY
Selected Publications
2020 Fuse Box Festival Catalog