Dolby Inventions
Jason Kofke grew up being known as the kid who could draw, so the idea of becoming an artist was always present. What developed as he studied and honed his craft later on was the aesthetic and the soul.“I like to work minimally so there this is an efficiency in visual elements.” He uses art as a "salvage ethnography" to attribute meaning to events and artifacts of the past. It’s the artist’s role to explain the past, present, and future, he has said, and he’s doing this by creating images through the exploration of recorded moments and preserved forms of history.
Medium: Illustration
Location: San Francisco
Date: 2015
For Dolby®, Kofke worked with historical footage and photos from the company — early lab shots, product iterations, and images of the people at work — and “tried to combine all of these images to make a somewhat loose and linear explanation of all of those factors in one piece,” he explains. “All media — be it a circuit board or a wavelength — express human ideas between humans and it is those communication options that are paramount. My hope with this piece is to present an idea exchange between genders, generations, distance, and language as the beginning and end to every new expression of technology that Dolby invents.” This larger concept is allowed to shine through in the way he produced the series of images — simply and minimally with detail in the line work. It’s also a reflection of his own visual perception: “I’m colorblind, so I tend to see the world in value and contrast as opposed to hue or saturation.”
And even though much of his work is ultimately achieved through classic techniques of drawing and printmaking, he still values the use of technology. “I am very against the traditional thought that technology isn’t a part of art,” Kofke says. “Technology should be embraced by artists and designers because it’s inherent in our tradition.”
