Nora N. Khan: Could you speak on the making of ​Contours​, alongside your thinking behind it? How does the work continue ideas you’ve been long pursuing in your practice?

Mark Dorf: This was my first major work of moving image. For the last ten years or so I’ve been making little animations as “sketches”—just casual things made to hash ideas out for myself. This began around 2011, I was working a lot with animated GIFs and 3D animation. I couldn't afford a new camera and I couldn't afford a studio, but naturally still felt compelled to make things, so I started exploring the digital mode of production. I found some free open source 3D software and had an old laptop, so this felt—at the time—like a ripe path forward. The GIFs and animations that I was making were a product of me surfing the web, finding other communities of digital artists, and surfing Tumblr—these kinds of things. So I've worked with moving imagery before, but in a very limited or entirely different capacity. ​Contours​ was the first time that I made a longer moving image work.

The title, ​Contours​, actually came first. I was thinking about the context of my body of work, of my entire practice, and thinking about the relationships I had been exploring between urbanism, design, and what we call “Nature”. I have often spoken about them as separate but entangled systems while seeing their interaction and exchange as a different system in and of itself: an entirely different environment that emerges from their rubbing shoulders.

But even thinking about these supposed systems as entangled and co-produced centralizes the human amongst these systems; a human is doing the naming. The systems being defined and named in the image of the human creates a hierarchy, in a certain sense. I began to think about what it would mean to decentralize the human in these systems—to think about the systems not as existing in a form of servitude. In thinking about this naming, I began to understand that language is the sort of ultimate lens of seeing; that's how we see the world. We can't avoid it. Contours​ is looking at words as contours themselves. Words and language are the things that name the outline, the thing that describes the thing.

The whole video is looking to point this out. You start out with this smaller frame that expands to this more panoramic image, but even the panoramic image then starts to shrink a little bit and you see this blue border around the edge. I am constantly reminding you of the frame itself, the contour of the video. One of the very first lines of voice over in the film is, “Words create my reality,” as you're looking at images from the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. These dioramas are often how we think “Nature” exists, or at least that’s how Western culture thought of “Nature” at the time that they were made. We hopefully have a more complex idea of “Nature” now than when Carl Akeley and Theodore Roosevelt created those dioramas.

But even though these dioramas are sculptural and object-based, they're essentially two-dimensional, so they become again still images. I then transfer them back into moving images, adding an additional level of mediation, further obscuring any kind of supposed origin. The only way we can talk about these images or even the video and work of art itself is through language, yet another distillation. The whole video is breaking apart this mediation and distillation, bringing it to the forefront and understanding that language and words are the ultimate human lenses. But as the video progresses, the mundane becomes skewed, suggesting that perhaps it is not the only lens.

Contours ​ends with a sort of melancholy resolution—it brings human-made lingual contours to the viewers’ attention, pointing out that it's impossible to escape the hold that language has on us. The viewer tries to name what they’re seeing in the video but what they’re seeing is unknown. It's important to understand that, and to sit with your own position, with the realization that other things, human and other-than-human, animate or inanimate, have entire lives and languages of their own that are unknown to you.

NK: Speaking of other things that remain unknown to us, at the very end of the video, we watch a cat-like beast of some kind. It is thrashing about. I'm made aware of how I am ever trying to capture this creature, trying to name it as it shifts in view from second to second.

We can speak about techniques of framing, juxtaposition, and layering, but it seems crucial to first talk about defamiliarization as an overarching frame for the work. Defamiliarization, or ​ostranenie,​ is essential for my own thinking about the internet, technological mediation, and digital visual culture. To make the mundane unfamiliar. In literature and film, when talking about this moment of sudden strangeness, this entry to surrealism, it's usually narrated as a moment. A familiar face turns sinister, or the domestic setting turns cryptic, all in a moment. We might think about these instances of quick defamiliarization versus the kind of slow defamiliarization that takes place through ​Contours​. How do you think about defamiliarization? How did you come to this old concept as a core one, given the context of this moment? It seems to be a strategy for loosening our human-centered perception.

MD: Defamiliarization is absolutely central to the work—becoming aware of the mundane, in a similar way that ambient music makes the background the subject itself. The whole video is a build up to this beast, this animal, this thing that is out of focus, and unnamable. At that moment, you're suddenly made aware of the failure of your words. But again, it begins in the most familiar space, which is this cartoonization of nature, or what we call “Nature,” in the Natural History Museum. I mean, these dioramas are ridiculous. They are perfect nuclear human families played out by taxidermy actors. They are less about the animal than about the human being, and our projection onto the landscape itself. It's an anthropomorphization where the male lion is out to protect and the female lion is with the cubs taking care of the family. They’re presented in the most perfect, formal, and picturesque composition. It's completely insane, and entirely unrealistic, aside from the fact that they're real taxidermy. It's an interesting kind of switch. In a certain sense, these dioramas are the most defamiliarized experience imaginable. They have so little to do with the actual world from which this taxidermy came and so much more with what we want from “Nature,” what we want to see in “Nature,” what we make with our words and our own visions in “Nature.” These dioramas attest a real lack of willingness to see the world for what it is, or to see the world in a way that accepts the unknown and the fact that we cannot know the reality of being a lion in prehistoric times. Over the course of this work’s twelve-minute journey, the environments and elements within them begin to shift in increasingly more drastic ways, which put the attention on the more subtle details. The mundane begins to skew with simple shifts in color, or physical morphings of shapes that are familiar, or rendering in a three-dimensional virtual space—placing elements together that would otherwise never coexist. Eventually, I am breaking it down even further, up to the scene near the end, where it's just clouds across everything. Viewers only see contours. There's a linking cloud texture across everything, and all elements become this eternally shifting cloud form that you can't pin down. They won’t stay still. Clouds are something that we so often project images onto, that we find forms in, they can become anything, but those images are always fleeting. Then the following scene is this dog. I just gave it away! It's a dog (​laughs)​. But really, what it is isn’t important.

NK: Or it’s a person!

MD: Yeah, it’s a ​thing.​ What matters is the motion. It feels lively. It's not something virtual, even though of course it is entirely virtual. I don't know if that answers your question.

NK: It does, especially in relation to the arc of the piece. The slow inculcation into a mode of seeing. When the Surrealists would describe a moment of sensing the uncanny or novelists describe just such surreal moments, they were usually a surprise, and seeing them, a matter of chance. The turn was sudden, usually in one’s field of vision, and usually revealed to someone who was already attuned to such shifts. The protagonist stumbles upon them. The moment often involved people's faces turning, halving, becoming grotesque; we see this as a trope in horror. That moment, that break, affords distance to think about the present moment and surroundings, one’s own personal mundane, differently. It becomes slanted.

In ​Contours, ​the strangeness is slow. There's a highly edited, constructed ritual of training viewers into seeing these tiny shifts, juxtapositions, to be inculcated into a moment of being defamiliarized. Within the context of being online, I can watch ​Contours​ in one tab; the next tab could be a mad Twitter feed with live feeds of puppies to the political horror, back to cute animals. We're constantly experiencing defamiliarization. I wonder how you're thinking about constructing these moments of defamiliarization within this larger context.

MD: The defamiliarization that you experience on Twitter might be different, for the reasons that you're talking about. I've constructed this environment to make defamiliarization almost the subject matter itself. We've made normal this environment of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever your drug of choice is, that it's like, this scatter of defamiliarization. It becomes so much of a wash for me that I’m not really paying attention to anything at all—it’s so defamiliarized that we see almost nothing in front of us. There's a hyper-saturated quality to these digital environments that we interact with, it makes us attuned to nothing except for what we're seeking out. And at that point, it's so targeted from the viewers’ point of view that the defamiliarization almost disappears.
The radical slowness in experimental film and art allows for deep attention to detail. In slow image production, I can account for these smaller elements that you've just sort of known as being part of life, like a skyscraper, or that a tree has a trunk, you know? But when the tree's trunk starts shifting in form and color, viewers have time to begin to think about that trunk. But then before they know it, the color and form have returned to normal, letting these new assessments land not on the effect that I have made, but rather the subject the effect is calling to.

NK: I was paying attention to the time code. Every time the scene would change, or the frame would switch, I would be turned away from trying to capture whatever I was seeing. I'm watching with the embedded aim to narrate, to describe. I took a lot of delight in the work’s frame refusing my efforts to capture. It felt like a game. There is a line of narration about ​the failure of language. For instance, there are these shots of the city at night. I'm coming up with some narrative, some voiceover, and then suddenly have to think of the forest in relation to the city, as I see trees inching into the frame. In another moment, I see prismatic abstract models against the city. Once the layering starts to happen, I'm trying to capture it all in language, in real time.
There’s a precise choreography to these strong juxtapositions. How do you think of choreographing this kind of strategic defamiliarizing, a strategic turning away of the viewer?

MD: I was trying to hop back and forth between environments that are often seen as not having anything to do with one another. In doing so, I’m also making efforts to bring elements from the last scene into the current. If you're thinking about the video as composed of sentences, it's like each new scene is a new sentence, but each sentence is using words from the last. It builds and builds and builds, until you eventually find yourself somewhere new, that has very little to do with where you started and everything to do with what came before it. It feels like it's a copy without a referent. It's refusing this modernist idea of origin. There is a fleeting vocabulary, it's shifting, viewers can't grasp it. As far as choreographing and juxtaposing different images, symbols, and footage next to one other, this was kind of the general structure that I was working towards — continually making viewers aware that they were watching a film while also making them aware that each scene is building on and breaking everything that came before it.

NK: There’s a significant tension between artifice and the natural through the piece. We have, first, a “direct” experience in the woods, a raw encounter. Then we are made aware of the frame. And then, we're contemplating the familiar, estranging built environment. Then we have this plinth, a dais, a virtual or digital composition atop, and then we close with a digital rose or flower. There are the artificial bison and lions seen against the slow movements of the woods; elsewhere, we're in a conference hall looking through glass at a forest.

How do you think about original authentic moments or experiences without mediation? Is there any moment without mediation in your experience? These moments play with that fantasy of authenticity.

MD: There is no moment without mediation, everything is a translation of something else. It's an exhausted conversation, and honestly, pretty detrimental socially, politically, and environmentally, to think about a point of origin. There's no return to what we call “Nature”; we have to build something new, create a new relationship, a cyborg relationship, to move forward in a more sustainable fashion. So no, this point of origin, of purity, is just an ideal. Sometimes it can be useful to think of things in that way to simplify situations in order to better understand them. But to remain in that place is quite dangerous.

A lot of my work outside of this film deals with this idea that the 'original' is entirely lost or never existed. You can see this in some of my older sculptural works. I was building these kinds of shelving units with astroturf lining the shelves, bottled water, faux fiberglass rocks, and prints of rocks and plants from botanical gardens all together in the same kind of container that is the shelving itself. All of these different elements presented together, and yet none of them come back to any sort of point of origin. They're all sort of influences from one another creating this strange vocabulary that seems to float independently of anything at all.

NK: This point of purity and authentic origin; it is a quick step over to the fantasy of neutrality, of objectivity. The phrase ___ ​is not neutral​ has taken root culturally, in critical discourse. Technology is not neutral; museums are not neutral. At the core of the critique is a pointing-to the idea of an objective, pure, or first space. We know what other ideologies that maps onto and with.

I teach criticism of technology and the attempt to be “critically aware” of the interface as constructed and ideological is a big part of our discussions. I remember a student asking me, “How do you actually see what the origin point is—the imagined original space of neutrality? Where is it? How do you name it?”

It seems we could become better attuned to these moments in which the natural is actively constructed and mediated, by lingering in these moments of contradiction. Especially because interfaces are designed to seem ideologically neutral or objective, without political orientation or goals. We have to linger in these uncomfortable contradictions, to feel the friction of, alongside, behind the frame.

MD: It's interesting that you bring up contradiction as well. Timothy Morton is this incredible advocate for contradiction. Without contradictions everything would be predictable. Everything would be an equation. You could move forward in a logical way and get from A to Z, no problem, everything would be there for you. Contradiction creates change. When you're presented with contrasting elements, in this case images or words, they engender a space of new thought—they create the possibility to look beyond whatever set of known relationships between predictable variables that you’ve had before, which is the positive twist on the film. I'm trying to reveal the limitations of experience through language, and by extension image, to reveal that we are part of this self-referential system of seeing and describing, but it is that contradiction between elements that allows for the production of new vocabulary. While you might not be able to fully decentralize yourself as a human within this larger system, you may be able to shift and expand your own boundaries and create new vocabulary to help better embrace and ease relations with this space of the unknown. Contradiction is hugely important to this work and to my practice.

NK: I’m curious about the sound, which feels key to this entrainment. Is there an analogue in the soundscape for the visual defamiliarization? In your collaboration with Cory Zimmerman, were you talking with them about this entrainment, the rituals of contradiction throughout? How sound could enhance that?

MD: Cory and I have known one another since we were kids. We used to play in bands together. We share so many interests ecologically, theoretically, ideologically. This was the first work of music that we made together in probably ten years or so. So for one, it was just exciting on that level. Rekindling a creative relationship. Cory and I spoke ​ad nauseum​ about all of these ideas, even before we knew we were going to collaborate on this.

The collaboration actually began with me writing one or two line poems and emailing them to Cory, asking him to sit with them for a day or two and make some kind of sound relating to them. The poems revolved around objects or beings relating to different time scales: stones, oceans, mosquitos... Elements with massively contrasting timescales. This resulted in him making tones that were matching in their diversity.

He would send me all of these stems, all of these WAV files, and I would cut them up and rearrange them into an orchestration and send them back to him, along with some new poems. Then he would re-record them in this orchestration and send that back to me, and then I would chop those up again, and then send them back to him. It was this ongoing process over and over again and it resulted in what we have in the film. There were naturally some stylistic directions that I was really pushing Cory to embrace, sounds that reflect a cavernous environment, deep, large environments, for obvious reasons. The ideas in the film are quite large, so we wanted sound to match them. More specifically, I was thinking about uses of echo as opposed to just reverb to create this space. Where echo sort of mimics this resistance of origin that we were talking about earlier. Eventually the sound that is echoing is so distant from what it came from, that if you were just to hear the echo, it would be difficult to decipher where or what made the sound in the first place. For example, that sort of “ding” at the beginning is Cory tapping a wine glass. But you would never know it. It's not important to me that viewers recognise this strange use of a wine glass, but rather that it is a sound that feels just parallel to something familiar.

It was however important that it had a feeling of physical production. That it doesn't feel entirely like a synthesizer. In fact, most of those sounds are not synthesized. They are guitars and strange things that Cory would tap with other strange objects. There is a physicality to what's going on. There is some digital synthesis, of course, but that is really just to fill out the sort of low ends, the deep sounds, that was mostly on a technical level. The core of it is the physical production.

NK: I was trying to discern whether I was listening to a synthetic or natural, a simulated sound or a natural sound. The way I listen to sound is influenced by what I'm seeing. The visual bleeds in. Watching, I was ever paying attention to when the sound would become more dimensional, or reminded me of ambisonic or binaural listening, or more spacious or more layered or thinned out. The process of composition can be felt. It’s a lovely thing that happens, being excited by the artifice, to find out that it isn't. The sound does add another layer after watching that way.

MD: This collaboration was one of the most exciting parts of the project. It was wonderful, fun, playful. I wasn't banging my head against the wall torturing myself trying to figure out why there is a dog instead of a cat, or if the shot should be in deep focus or out of focus, or if there should be a water cooler versus a water bottle, or if any of this mattered in the first place. It was gestural and fun.

NK: It's a beautiful feeling when you can loosen your own practice and find that play with someone else. There’s a loosening of training or a set way of making that’s close to our identity, our way of making things. How you described the practice as a cycle, throwing of the puck back and forth between you both, is delightful.

Let’s come back to the close, or the beginning. The dog-cat, at points, dolphin, at points, a person bent in prayer, low down to the ground. That tossing movement of a head, up. I thought immediately about one of my favorite novels, Molloy,​ by Samuel Beckett. Beckett often has people crawling on the ground. There's this long scene in ​Molloy​, where the narrator reaches a frenzy in their long existential reflection on what kind of intelligence or being they really are. They are crawling through the mud in the woods, and they’re looking up at this crepuscular light. They’re losing language. Are they a creature crawling through the mud or a person?

There's good theory now from the field of cognitive studies on these moments that Beckett has the consciousness of a human narrator approaching an animal thinking. What would narrating an animal perspective really be like with our language? Is a state between sense and nonsense, or a sense we could understand?

The longer I look at the cat-dog person in your film, the more I think about being without words. I'm very moved by what lingers at the cusp of language. On your website, you write of “post-anthropocentric vision.” Would a post-anthropocentric vision involve a little less speaking, and a little more quiet? A refusal of all modes of capture, including language? More generally, how do you think about language in relation to your work? You said that perhaps we can never escape language or speaking, but how do you think about silence, not speaking?

MD: As far as post-anthropocentric vision, it's kind of a silly term I cooked up. We are human, and we can't be not human. Or maybe we will become something different later down the line in the distant future that could be considered post-anthropocentric. But this is a utopia. It's a marker on a horizon that moves away from us just as quickly as we move towards it. But in theorizing about this point of view, I definitely think that a post-anthropocentric vision is dependent upon silence, being able to be quiet and to stop projecting your own vision onto the world.

But in doing so, there's such an incredible reduction of oneself that I think it's impossible to say what that looks like. We're so entangled with language. I can’t think without language. I remember reading once about the color blue, and how it is usually the last color to be defined in language development. Ancient poetry and song would often describe the sky or the ocean as if it was dancing around defining its color. It was thought that perhaps we didn't even see the color blue in the same way that we do now, because we didn't have a word to describe it.

That's a recurring thought for myself; if we don't have a word for something then it essentially doesn't exist. If we are to reduce our language and we are to be quiet and think without language, then what are we left with? Aside from the most primary experience, which is that of the body. That is our ultimate, our essential contour, our environment, the human body. I wonder if at that point it's like an inward sort of reflection and rejection maybe, of the outward? This is something that I struggle with. I suppose that struggle is the entire reason for making this work in the first place. Contours​ is my step into this space of the unknown, my attempt to expand and shift my lingual boundaries to accept and cohabitate this space of the unknown.