New media works
Cyberia, 1994
Alphaville Hotel 8:10 OCEANIC TIME * this type fades up on the script image-writer machine.
‘... I’ve tried to fight it for many days. Slowly I’m disappearing behind the machine....
*Iris widens: Hotel desk, stationary. The machine’s probing camera lense snorkles out almost snapping at you hungry to be fed. This camera is mounted on the image machine.
‘I don’t want to be seen. No.’
The lens iris closes.
‘I’ve become a horribly disfigured thing. Like her.’
Horrible sucking sounds. VIEWS OF THE MACHINE
‘For the longest time, I thought it was a magic trick, an illusory synthetic prestidigitation. How could such a thing remain beloved. A binary construction. Captured in a digital bottle. In my yearning for her form I found that she was formless. Like me now -- the boundaries of my flesh dissolving away.
World Picture Clock, 1996
https://vimeo.com/26328829
http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/idealine/textonly.html
The World Picture Clock', it is an engine that gives forth a portrait of the world as a place of multiplicity, simultaneity and emergence. It does not privilege a single point of view, but rather a proliferation of views. It is an interface that allows the participant to arrange the world in associative ways emphasizing duration and presence. Simultaneity, juxtaposition, the world in its all-at-once-ness, the world clock is a polyoptic viewfinder amplifying the many properties of the time-world network and the web. At once active and passive, the World Clock pushes the world while acting as a surfboard, a navigational interface: the metabolic function of the world.
HyperHyper, The Unbounded Wor(l)d, 1997
HyperHyper is a writing machine that distributes a writing reading experience in a computational hypertextual platform. It plays in and out of the spaces of meaning and sense. One could say that meaning relies on depth while sense is a surface phenomenon.In the new space of computation, language is ever more clearly virus, a contamination, but also as a typography, a visual force, a playground, a plaything, a place of discovery, of creation: a metabolic function doing its thing. This visual and graphic essay explores this new space of reading-writing while curating practices and reflections of the word at the same time.
Art and Culture, 1999
https://vimeo.com/18680600
https://vimeo.com/18678895
From here I became interested in mapping my interest and love of the arts, from pop culture to more obscure things, across all the arts and philosophy, everything I loved, putting all the authors, recordings, images, ideas, artists, musicians architects, choreographers, operas, in a new reading space. a computational space that allowed one to move both hierarchically through knowledge and at the same time laterally or associatively allowing for discovery at surprising angles. the ideas of chance, any possible way, this way and that way, order and emerging order, all the many advances that delighted me in these other mediums could be furthered and played with in the space of computation and the network.
The first artandculture was beautiful. We had an extraordinary group of people and met with much success. It was sold unfortunately in distress in the heady dot com years and redone by new management which is what you see today. The original lost on a server in the ether, Here are some videos of this work.
Muse, 2000
In early 2000 before the dot com crash with the Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art, Artandculture was to be integrated into a new for profit venture, MUSE. We did a number of designs for them which included this hyper dense but elegant cloud.
The Vanndemar Memex or Laura Croft Stripped Bare by Her Assassins, Even, 1999
http://on1.zkm.de/netcondition/projects/project69/default_e
The Vanndemar Memex is a rumination on the many fascinating tropes of extended self, distributed narrative, artificial life, collective intelligence and emergent systems. The Memex, set up in the context of a game, re-assembles Duchamp, Vannevar Bush, video games and many contemporary art works putting forward the notion of a engine from which works happen. The work is structured as a series of events, organized by episodes, a tool set, narrative tracks and collective networked actions.
Ambient Machines, 2000
https://www.ambientmachines.net/
The ambient machine, explores the setting of visual language, on the surface of the screen according to cinematic technique.
Here seen in The Cinematic Construction of Emotional Space
The Event of the Image, 2001
https://www.metabolichouse.com/marclafia/Artist_Statement.html
'The this, or thusness of this work as photograph (which it really isn't, it's an image that reads backwards as a photograph or carries forward with the aura of the photograph and as such is given those attributes) is turned to imaging photography itself. It turns the occurrence of time to the occurrence of imaging.'
Variable Montage, 2002
https://www.zkm.de/futurecinema/lafia_werk_e.html
Variable Montage
A work of computational and algorithmic cinema
As cinema is informed by computation montage becomes less about narration and more about construction. Such constructions can be thought of as architectures of possibility. In this work twenty-seven still frames from a Russian film are broken into five segments that continually vary and permutate. Permutation allows for a continuing inflection of various possibilities of meaning and texture. Each of the five segments has also associated with them a small phrase from Mahler’s Ninth symphony and these sounds vary pitch, alternate and overlap as the speed of the images and sequences play. As image is driven by computation, montage becomes variable and loses the preciseness of rendition that traditional cineastes practice. Variability as constructed with computation allows for a continual iteration, a continual play within very defined structures of possibility and in some sense changes our very notion of montage. The results of this montage give forth surprise, coincidence, deformation, collision, ambiguity and all possibilities of excess. This excess, characteristic of the digital, naturally tends to proliferate, multiply and replicate.
Computations, 2003-2004
https://www.youtube.com/marclafia#p/u/28/5fp_v8uxUrQ
https://www.youtube.com/marclafia#p/u/11/VOuv5wWOnPw Joan of Arc
In these films as mentioned above surprise, coincidence, deformation, collision, ambiguity and all possibilities of excess within of course the envelope of the algorithm.
The Battle of Algiers, (commissioned by the Tate and Whitney Museums), 2006
https://www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/battle_of_algiers.shtm
The Battle of Algiers by Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin 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' organisation: 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.
Self Exposure, 2006
https://www.flickr.com/photos/marclafia/sets/72157600702175071/
The Battle of Algiers by Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin 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' organisation: 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.
3 Things, 2007
https://vinylisheavy.blogspot.com/2007/08/sound-youre-watching.html
In some sense the phenomenon of YouTube returns us to the early days of cinema which has been referred to, before its language of narrative and editing evolve, as a cinema of attractions. In these early days when cinema was a novelty, an entrepreneur, some one like Edwin S. Porter (who would go on to make, 'The Great Train Robbery') would buy up a number of short films, go from town to town, rent a hall, publicize his event and gather up an audience for a screening. There, with his reels of film and accompanying musician, the entrepreneur who was also the projectionist, would create an order to his films, cue his music and in many cases talk over them. The entrepreneur was a story teller, our first editor, who used sound to narrativize the any arrangement of reels of images he cared to play.
The sound image relationship for the moving image did not become uniform until the late 1920's and the advent of synch sound.It is sound that so often tells us what we are watching. In the creation of Three Things, anyone can place three videos, next to each other, and with then move the mouse to play the audio of any one video to orchestrate all three. It is this use of sound that is most distinct about the project or rather what distinguishes it. It is not 3 images and their sounds playing side by side simultaneously, it is 3 images uniquely inflected by the unique sound of the others and the ability to control the sound tracks one at a time. It is the ability to re-narrativize the image with sound that makes the project unlike others out there.
Cinema Engine, 2007
The cinema engine is a new kind of projector written in software. Here films are made from files. There is no shot reverse shot, there are tableaux of shots, often re-orchestrated by sound.
A collection of works including computations, permutations, remixes, short and narrative films and more are on the cinema engine.
The Image Moving, 2008
11 films made with still photographs
Becoming Recordings, 2010
The participatory project creates a platform for actions and conversation around recording and network culture.
Writing Space, 2011
Writing Space presents over 200 mixed media works, my own and others in an all-at-once reading space. By removing the CSS left and right margins of a ‘public’ themed tumblr blog and with use of ‘infinite scroll’ this customized blog presents a new event of reading. As most reading is one thing after another or in the space of the web, hyperlinked, this all-at-onceness at first confounds and overwhelms until one begins to see the whole of it. Never the less, where to begin, It cannot be understood as a linear construction, beginning at the beginning and proceeding through the middle to the end. One of the most striking things of computational readings is that the page can be reconfigured. In this work one can drag out the bottom right hand corner of the ‘page’ and make a horizontal browsing window where one can see one entry after the next.
