Mesh Translation #2 comes from Mark Dorf’s 2014 series Emergence that was developed at the Rocky Mountain Biological Research Laboratory. While working at the lab, Dorf’s images became influenced by the collection and analysis of data and how this data is an abstraction of our sensory experience. Despite the abstract quality of collection and analysis, it is through these processes that science is able to produce knowledge about the world. Similarly abstraction throughout the history of art also activates a mode of knowledge production.When the prints from this series were initially exhibited, these animations were distributed online as a counterpoint. The form seen in the composition is generated from a photograph: each pixel in the photograph aligns with a vertex on a 3D virtual mesh and depending on the brightness of the pixel information, the vertex will rise or fall.Through this treatment, all images become comparable for all that is left is color information and 3D form—what was formerly the subject in the image is entirely lost. Ansel Adams Half Dome is suddenly on the same formal level as a product shot from Amazon.com. This kind of transformation of data that makes seemingly disparate subjects comparable is often utilized in ecology and other scientific modes of inquiry.
Categories
Mesh Translation #2
