User:Marc lafia

Marc Lafia

Marc Lafia is a conceptual artist, filmmaker and information designer. His work is about systems and events, repetition and difference. In films, photography, video and network media, he re-considers and re-presents such systems as machines of authoring and reading procedures. For him a work is a metabolism: active, vital, alive, a writing-reading-viewing machine.

His best known works include 'The Battle of Algiers' 2004, (http://www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/battle_of_algiers.shtm) which consists of a continual re-composition of scenes from the seminal 1965 film of the same name, by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo.

The original film proposes a re-enactment of historical events. The success of the actual battle for independence in Algiers has been attributed to the nationalists' organization: a pyramidal structure of self organised cells. Lafia and Lin's work uses computation to re-present the logic of the nationalists' tactics as depicted in Pontecorvo's film, by playing and sequencing clips along varied algorithmic trajectories.

In "The Vanndemar Meme-x or Lara Croft Stripped Bare by her Assassins, Even" 2000 (http://www.memexengine.net) he combines the logics of cinema and games to create a machine that explores, plays with, constructs and deconstructs narratives. "The Memex" explores the question: How is it we give representation and operation to multiple fictionalized and extended selves through varied agency (some tele-remotely, others involving prosthetics and robots, and some, through entirely new constructs) and further how do such actions form collective?. Reassembling Duchamp, Vannevar Bush, video games and many contemporary art works. "The Meme-x" is the art work as engine, a machine that makes work happen.

Marc is also founder and information architect of ArtandCulture.com (http://www.artandculture.com) which allows for the experiential, contextual and associative exploration of 26 disciplines of arts.

Becoming Image/Agent of the Image by Daniel Coffeen

Marc Lafia takes up conceptual art, cinema, network media, photography, and information design in order to explore the limits of the image, of narrative, of art, of knowledge and sense making, of media itself. His work and research is a hybrid project drawing a new map of a territory yet to be defined, a territory with new and yet unknown modes of authoring, reading, and organizing the world. His work simultaneously questions, probes, discovers and creates this new territory, these new practices.

From his early days in film school through to the present, Marc has been interested in the diverse ways that the means of telling stories inflect the stories themselves. As a young filmmaker, he explored the way the stuff of cinema—the fabric of film, the camera and the lens, the actors and the word—do not just present (or represent) the world but inflect the world.

As the media landscape shifted towards the digital, the computational, and the network, his work began to ask new questions: In an age of digital proliferation, what becomes of an image that is always already reproduced to infinity, that is always already manipulated? What happens to individuality as we collectively create and curate ourselves within the global network? As our world accumulates and proliferates images and information, what new kinds of sense-making emerge? How do images go in this new world—their production, consumption, dissemination, their potency, their affective resonances, their possibilities?

Marc's practice explores, explodes, and performs these questions as he creates work that quite literally works, forging systems and events, systems that create events, that proliferate, produce, and organize the world in often surprising ways. Taking up film, photography, video, network media, and information design he (re)considers and (re)presents systems as machines of authoring and reading procedures. His work is productive in the broadest sense of the word.

For Marc, a work is a metabolism: active, vital, alive, a writing-reading-viewing machine, a site for engagement, for possibility. His work pushes us to see, to see anew, to see differently. His early films, for instance, explore the tensions between narrativity and the pure surface of film. As they move between signification systems and machines of rhythm, sound and image, they oscillate between operations of chance and discrete narrative systems, between meaning and sense. In his feature film, Exploding Oedipus, we see the same gesture: film itself is the subject, filmmaking and viewing as productive of memory, transformation, freedom.

With the rise of digital technology—and with it the network and the computational—Marc was able to (re)create a new kind of kind of image and a new sense of duration. In 1994 he created and brought on line the World Picture Clock to extend time and the image of the world into something simultaneous, multiple and becoming. He presented the world not as a place of crisis and media event but of being and becoming in time.

In the digital the cinema was no longer limited by the inflexibility of camera and celluloid. The digital allowed Marc to create a cinema engine such as "Ambient Machines" that proffers a grammar of cinema while allowing users to make, save, and share their own films. Steve Deitz, a former curator at the Walker Arts Center, describes "Ambient Machines" as "an open source, online experimental film studio and archive rolled up into one sensational package. Beginning with a few different sequences, users can construct their own 'movies' online and then save them to the site for others to incorporate as building blocks...In addition, by overlaying various clips, the participant-creator can experiment not only with linear sequencing but the ability to create a kind of syncopated moving picture, which can be truly remarkable."

In "The Vanndemar Meme-x or Lara Croft Stripped Bare by her Assassins, Even", Marc combines the logics of cinema and games to create a machine that explores, plays with, constructs and deconstructs narratives. "The Memex" explores the question: How is it we give representation and operation to multiple fictionalized and extended selves through varied agency (some tele-remotely, others involving prosthetics and robots, and some, through entirely new constructs) and further how do such actions form collective?. Reassembling Duchamp, Vannevar Bush, video games and many contemporary art works. "The Meme-x" is the art work as engine, a machine that makes work happen.

From open and interactive works in the space of the network, he began to explore algorithms as a way to order and give new articulation to image and system—and to the very way we create and consume moving pictures. The celluloid, reel, projector, screen: these are all transformed by Marc's algorithmic, computational appetite. This is perhaps best seen in "The Battle of Algiers," a work commissioned by the Whitney and Tate Modern. In this work, Marc creates an application that literally digests Pontecorvo's great film of the same title and then plays it back as an ever-shifting play of scenes, moments, and affects that reveals the dynamics, speeds, and shapes of the French-Algerian struggle. The effect is to strip the film of one kind of narrative and introduce a different mode of making sense. As Daniel Coffeen writes in the essay accompanying the piece, "This 'The Battle of Algiers' deemphasizes the film's dramaturgic components, focusing on the film's modes of movement, its meanderings and collisions, its speeds and drifts, its points of intensity, its lines of force, its fluxes and flows. This 'The Battle of Algiers brings the database to the fore, articulating and amplifying the film's multiple trajectories."

In "The Battle of Algiers," Marc does nothing less than fundamentally recast the cinematic, not by breaking it or disrupting it but by superseding it. As Coffeen writes, "We've left the realm of the reel that goes around and around and entered a new territory. The byte has splayed the reel, excavating, expanding and exploding its nascent multiplicity. This 'The Battle of Algiers" does not as much offer a revolution as a proliferation—which may, after all, be the true revolution." Which is to say, Marc's work is as generous as it is voracious, taking up older forms and, rather than mocking or destoying them, he puts them into play within his new mediascape.

In 2005, Marc spent the entire year, each day, making a new film called "Permutations." But it more than a new film per se: it is a new kind of film, one not constrained by the reel, not constrained by the univocal projector and screen. This entailed working with programmers at MIT to create a new kind of projector, a digital projecting machine capable of broadcasting multiple films at the same while being able to control the interplay of sound, speed, and screen size. The result is radical. As the critic, Daniel Coffeen, writes, "'Permuations' radically recast the architectonics of film....The reel has been consumed by the computational and splayed. Lafia’s great discovery is that we don’t have to run films through projectors, through a technology that begs for linearity...By killing the reel and multiplying the screen, Lafia becomes the image’s most obedient agent. ' Finally,' the images in 'Permutations' declare, 'finally we can breathe, go as we go, along diverse temporal tracks, side-by-side, a simultaneity that is not spatially constrained, a contiguity that is not sequential. Here, we can play.' It’s as if the moving image wound out of its reel in order to forge a technology that suits it better.’"

In 2007 Marc launched 'F4, The Photography Desktop Collective' to examine image and imaging in the new inscription spaces of social networks and the vast archives of the web. In his ‘My Space Portraits’ and the ‘The Image Alone’ he explores reading and presentation of image in the public spaces of web. This work continued his exploration of photography to consider the image in its many modes and instantiations. His varied photo series have included 'The Event of the Image', 'Black and White', 'American Flags', ‘Still, an Image’ each both presenting the beauty and power of an image while simultaneously functioning as examinations and explorations of the nature of the image.

This, in many ways, sums up Marc's work, if a summary is even possible or desired: he is an agent of the image, following the diverse paths diverse media offer images, their production and consumption. Which is to say, Marc is as interested in images—their beauty, their composition—as he is in the making of images, or what he calls “imaging.” His work reveals the workings of images, their making and viewing, their history, their modes of configuration. In his images there is always another image which is the image becoming. His work repeatedly asks: What are the possibilities of imaging? How does the image become? How does it go?

Marc is also founder and information architect of ArtandCulture.com (www.artandculture.com) which allows for the experiential, contextual and associative exploration of 26 disciplines of arts. Launched in December 1999, the site has been recognized with numerous awards and distinctions including the Silver Medal from ID magazine, the Communication Arts Award for Interactive Design, a One Show award, an Art Director’s Club Award and the best of show at the SXSW festival 2000. After a year of development in 2008 he re-launched the site as a new kind of social and knowledge network to invite all lovers of the arts to join in a greatly amplified conversation, in a multiplicity of conversations that all can join in, share their taste, their work, their passion, their knowledge. It is designed for an urban planner to learn from a choreographer, a musician from a conceptual artist, a poet from the folds in a dress, to forge discovery, to allow for surprise to foster international dialogue.

He has taught at Stanford University, the San Francisco Art Institute, Pasadena Art Center College of Design. Pratt Institute and Columbia University.

REFERENCES

Investigating Film Algorithm Transtextuality in the Age of Database Cinema Christiano Poian, University of Udine http://www.poian.org/writings/Investigating_Film_Algorithm.pdf

Film, Play, Power and the Computational, or Byting Celluloid February 2006 Daniel Coffeen http://www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/entry15539.shtm

Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative New Riders Press, 2002 Mark Meadows http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0735711712

All Movie Guide http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=1:86967

Recombinant Territories, Editors: camila duprat martins | daniela castro e silva | renata motta http://www.premiosergiomotta.org.br/diversos/d_551.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Battle of Algiers 2007, Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin http://www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/battle_of_algiers.shtm

ArtandCulture http://www.artandculture.com/

Memex Engine or Lara Croff Stripped Bare by her Assassin, Even http://www.memexengine.net