Jeff Dobrow’s talents in technology-based art were instilled by some strict nuns, honed during decades of commercial computer programming, and finally unleashed 10 years ago after attending a Burning Man event.
The technology-based visual artist and creative director will be the featured artist at SOMA Night Lights, a mostly outdoor, immersive arts experience in downtown Wilkes-Barre’s newly branded South Main Arts District that The Diamond City Partnership and Sordoni Art Gallery at Wilkes University are hosting on April 25.
SOMA Night Lights will feature video-mapped projections on buildings throughout the arts district. Dobrow’s will appear on Wilkes University’s Weckesser Hall and the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church steeple. He’s also consulting on a projection compiled from community submissions. His new projections will be totally different than those shown during a 2021 visit to Wilkes-Barre, he said.
The video-mapping technique aligns video artwork to three-dimensional forms, using surfaces beyond flat screens to create immersive visuals.
How it works
“I’m just creating an animation that, basically, I render out to a little movie that could be put onto YouTube. The differences start to take shape here in what it is that I am doing. I could be doing a dinosaur like in Jurassic Park in 3D and having it run around. Instead, I am choosing a building and I am creating a physically accurate – to-the-inch, if I can — three-dimensional model of this building,” Dobrow said.
Sometimes, he’ll use a 3D Lidar scanner to measure all of the dimensions of a building in order to create a model. Once he creates the model on a computer, he’ll go to the building and, with an industrial-sized projector, align the model with his three-dimensional scene “so that everything fits,” Dobrow said.
“The best way to think of this is as a Jell-O mold and Jell-O,” Dobrow said.
His scan of the building creates a model that serves as his Jell-O mold.
“So, when I take the Jell-O mold home with me, I can now make all my 3D art that I want on this building (using computer programs and apps),” Dobrow said. “Then the night of the show, we go back out and, because everything was set up beforehand, my art will then fit back on top of that building exactly like the Jell-O mold would fit right back on the Jell-O,” Dobrow said.
From nuns to RadioShack
Dobrow, 55, currently lives in the mountains outside Elkton, Virginia, near the Harrisonburg/Charlottesville area.
Born in Racine, Wisconsin, he grew up in several places across the country, including Lincoln, Nebraska, El Paso, Texas and Louisville, Kentucky, as his father traveled for his job in the retail shoe industry. He moved to Miami when he was in his 20s and later to Michigan before moving to Elkton.
Dobrow described his interest in the arts as “one big circular kind of thing.”
“My earliest education was at a very strict Latin Catholic academy,” Dobrow said. “The nuns taught a very precise, disciplined art program. Whether you were in kindergarten or anything above, you were being trained in dimensional drawing and all kinds of things. I didn’t really realize this at the time, but I really liked that.”
At the age of 12, he discovered computers in a Tandy RadioShack store.
Dobrow recalled his fascination, first with Tandy’s TRS-80 line, then Apple’s products and eventually IBM’s a few years later.
“Right about that time is when computers were starting to get known, and I took to that very heavily and got into programming and was very interested in offering immersive experiences. At the time, they were text-based video games,” he said.
Games and graphics
The earliest he remembered was the Colossal Cave Adventure, which ran on mainframes and helped launch the commercial computer game industry.
“You’d read a description like a book and type things in, like, go down the hallway or pick up the lamp, and they were vast… they were mind-blowing,” Dobrow recalled.”
Right around the same time, computer graphics were emerging on the scene.
“So, we’re having this kind of heyday. At that time, one person could sit down and write an incredible experience or program. It’s not like now, where it’s huge, vast teams and programs are massive. I mean, one person could sit down and write a tremendous game that would run in under 16 kilobytes,” he said.
Dobrow continued with this hobby throughout high school, as video effect machines were introduced and computers became increasingly aligned with video production. After graduating, he took odd jobs writing computer programs.
Around 1989, he created a company to do graphics and design and animation for the broadcast industry.
“The whole point of this was that I hadn’t quite discovered art yet. What I discovered was design, commerce, advertising. I discovered what you would learn being brought up in the ‘80s, which is, make money,” Dobrow said.
It ‘changed everything in me’
“So, you know, I made those inroads and did quite well, and I had a long career in advertising at the global level and all this kind-of-great stuff. And then when I was roughly 45, I had an experience at a Burning Man event, and it just changed everything in me,” Dobrow said.
“I really realized that the majority of what I’d been doing — for a short time, not my entire career — had changed so much, and advertising in the industry that I was in, it changed so much that I was really, more, manipulating people into worrying about things and striving and killing themselves to have things they didn’t need, and raising their children that way and instilling those beliefs in them — minimizing community and humanity,” Dobrow said.
The emphasis on materialism had “kind of taken over, a little bit” in his life and work.
“So, in a lot of ways, just even at that surface level, I could see where I was so involved and had such a role in manipulating people, literally. And so, I wanted out of that, and I wanted to communicate everything that I could and use it towards sharing art, empowerment, inspiration, anything like that I could find,” Dobrow said.
“Through that Burning Man experience, I discovered projection art and things that I just had no idea it even existed. And I realized I wanted to do that. And I could. And I did. And that’s what I set out to do 10 years ago,” he said.
Has he accomplished those goals?
“So far, so good,” Dobrow said. “It’s been a lot of journeying within that 10 years. But, projection arts, and what I think is my ability to create an interpretive piece that has broad appeal has taken hold, and feedback is good, and jobs come, and it’s working.”
Find him online
Learn more about artist Jeff Dobrow and see his art on his website at zilog80.com and follow him on Instagram at instagram.com/zilog80_visual_art.
Originally Published: April 18, 2025 at 4:23 PM EDT
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