On Marc Lafia: Mathieu Borysevicz:

The Event of Art , 2020

In this essay, from the "The Event of Art, critic Daniel Coffeen writes, “while Lafia may not have a traditional medium –Lafia may not have a traditional medium – (there is no such thing anymore) – he does in fact have one consistent medium: imaging making itself, its apparati of creation, consumption, and circulation. In fact Lafia’s medium is the discourse of art – what it is, how it comes to be, how we experience it.” Press Release Punctum Books publishes seminal work on artist/filmmaker/author Marc Lafia. Punctum Books, the open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing, is proud to announce the release of The Event of Art: a seminal publication on the work of artist, filmmaker, and author Marc Lafia. The book interweaves essays, notes, photographic archives, and a host of exhibitions wherein Lafia traverses his wide body of work examining the cultural landscape as it moves from analog to digital. Lafia’s work emerges with remix and network culture as it changes our relationship to knowledge, ourselves, our memories, and our bodies: from one of representation to presentation, and from contemplation to new modes of embodiment, producing new subjectivities and new ways of going in the world. In front of us now is not the image but rather the protocols and interfaces to a networked culture, ever re-mixable and variable. Through fifty-two modular chapters and over eight hundred pages and images, Lafia takes us from his computational works to his later interest in the realm of the sensible and sensate. Here he presents art as the medium itself, giving us wide permission to explore and examine our deepest feelings and senses, our world and its becoming. The book is introduced by two essays: the first by curator and art dealer Mathieu Borysevicz recounting meeting Lafia at his first and only artist residency after spending years in Hollywood as a screenwriter and film director (working with Madonna, Michael Jackson, David Fincher, writing early drafts of Judge Dread, Iron Man, Software and others) and then Silicon Valley (as founder of artandculture.com). Borysevicz recounts Lafia’s tracing of media archaeology from the VCR to MTV to computation to network culture. He details the many projects he produced for Lafia, including the participatory works done at the Shanghai Financial Center and the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale. In his essay, Borysevicz introduces Lafia’s interest in recording as it becomes digital and computational where “recording is not only memory, and a data structure, but a permutational instrument and ever-changing horizon of iterations.” In the second essay, critic Daniel Coffeen writes, “while Lafia may not have a traditional medium – (there is no such thing anymore) – he does in fact have one consistent medium: imaging making itself, its apparati of creation, consumption, and circulation. In fact Lafia’s medium is the discourse of art – what it is, how it comes to be, how we experience it.” The Event of Art presents art as a complex material and societal event. The event is multiple, a continual becoming of perception, being, materiality, participation, a coming to the senses and the making, shaping and opening to them, not only of oneself, but the world becoming.

THE EVENT OF ART presents the work of art as a complex material and societal event. The event is multiple, a continual becoming of perception, being, materiality, participation, a coming to one’s own senses. The work of art is the event of becoming present to one’s embodiment. Lafia traverses and self examines how his early strategies of cultural reading of photography and film, of interface and network culture and social media transform to an investigation of materiality itself. His interest becoming the realm of the sensible and the sensate. Here he presents the idea of art as a medium itself, giving us wide permission to explore and examine our deepest feelings and senses, our world and its becoming.

Museums and Digital Culture

This chapter focuses on the work and life of digital artist Carla Gannis. Originally from North Carolina, Gannis received a BFA from UNC Greensboro, and an MFA in painting from Boston University. In 2005 she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts, and since then, she lives and works in Brooklyn, where she is a professor and assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute. Conveying her journey from painter to digital artist and storyteller, we explore the evolution of her artistic expression from painting to digital art, a story that ties broadly to the development of the digital arts field from the 1990s to present. Presented both through images of her work, and by way of a face to face unrehearsed interview, this chapter touches upon many of the highly pertinent topics impacting artists and museums in the 21st-century digital age. Among these, of special interest to museums are her observations on audiences, and how working in digital media affords new opportunities and multiple ways of connecting to the viewer, and reaching vast numbers of people across the globe, traveling from the gallery to the public square, in particular, Times Square and the Internet, showing that the life of a digital work can have multiple states of being. Gannis emphasizes the cultural positioning of digital spaces in physical places where diverse large public audiences can experience the work and where the artist can feel the pulse of public reaction and interaction. A feature of her work is her expression of self and gender through digital manifestations of persona, being and social consciousness, that take very original shapes and forms, images, colors and animations that merge into digital interpretations of self and the surrounding world revealing her creative imagination and sense of poetry used to convey new narratives embedded in her work and life (Fig. 19.1).

IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies

From Emojis to Manga, from western adverts to "foreign" brand consciousness, visual products are continuing their near instantaneous circulation around the globe. Especially their apparent "naturalness" and freedom from translation is appealing. But here also lies the problem: many of the consumers of these images are oblivious to the fact that these materials have been constructed by social actors with specific backgrounds and specific agendas in mind; thus, especially their "foreign" receptions create challenges, including ethical ones. In order to properly study these fairly new phenomena, a different kind of terminology is needed, not one that relies on older media concepts, but one that does them justice in terms of their contextual and technological complexity, multivalence and mobility. I will propose the term "VisionBytes" for these phenomena. These denote complex visual arrays, oftentimes of foreign cultural origin and consisting of still or moving images. They circulate within a system of non-photography as sketched by François Laruelle (2013) and are akin to the "objects" described in Quentin Meillassoux' Beyond Finitude (2010). Invariably, they touch on issues of belonging, identity, exclusion, globalisation, human and AI rights, all points featuring strongly in this text. Already today, these images have begun participating in the preparations for the gaze of the (technological) Other, of a possible singularity which for the first time will allow humans to review themselves and thus be seen by non-human intelligent others, a trajectory already taking its course. As so often, art is at the forefront of these mediated upheavals. In the final part of the article, I will examine a number of recent art pieces/installations from a 2016 Art Fair in Shanghai, from the 2017 Dokumenta 14 in Kassel, and from an ongoing internet project. These select pieces all point to an ever more life-permeating media future where wanting to merely live with media will never do.

Critique d’art, 2010

Vista, 2024

As its aesthetics, methods, and conceptual focus have, in many respects, merged with those of mainstream contemporary art, the boundaries of media art have become more unclear than when the use of technology in art was more of a rare occurrence. While the term "media art" may be helpful in designating a particular sphere of practice and discourse, its current meaning has shifted as a result of changing contexts surrounding the use of technology in art. From its close association with "new media" such as the digital computer, the internet, screen-based media, and interactive systems in the early days of media art as a field, this term now bears re-evaluation in light of the pervasive use of technology we are familiar with in the post-digital condition. As many of these defining forms of new media have lost their novelty and have also been adopted in mainstream artistic practices, media art may be defined less by its engagement with specific media than by stylistic and referential aspects derived from its historical lineage. This paper draws comparisons between early discussions on media art and recent developments in this area with the aim of developing insights into whether and in what capacity media art remains relevant as a term for addressing technologically engaged contemporary artistic practices. By considering media art in such terms, this investigation reconsiders what may be regarded as defining aspects of the field, enquiring into what potential this reframing may have for practitioners and theorists working with this topic.

Choice Reviews Online, 2013

Inhabiting the technosphere. Art and technology beyond technical invention Prepublication Manuscript "Media convergence under digitality actually increases the centrality of the body as a framer of information: as media lose their material specificity, the body takes on a more prominent function as selective processor in the creation of images." 1 The body as a framer of information: This notion, presented in the introduction to Mark Hansen's 2004 New Philosophy of New Media, could also stand as an introduction to the general condition under which art after 1989 thinks, produces and engages with technology. It marks not just a shift in thinking that concerns our general understanding of media technologies and practices-but an equally significant shift taking place within the type of artistic practice where new media and information technologies are not just deployed but are themselves also objects of thinking, investigation and imagination. The 1 Timothy Lenoir, Foreword, in Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, MIT Press, 2004, xxii task for art history is then to try to understand the newly prominent mediatic body that emerges with this shift-to discover its various manifestations in artistic practice, as well as its implications for aesthetic theory. In particular, we need to conceptualize its double relation to, on the one hand, technological media and the realm of media production and, on the other hand the notion of the artistic medium. With this shift, several influential conceptions of the relation between art, technology and media may be questioned. Firstly, the notion of the body as a framer of information challenges some of the most influential theorizations of the cultural shift that took place in the 1990's, as the Internet became a global phenomenon and digital processing emerged as a communal platform for all previously separate media and technologies of expression. One was the marginalization of art in the realm of new media. Digital media leave aesthetics behind, Friedrich Kittler claimed, with all the apocalyptic gusto of the early computer age: In distinction to the consciousness-flow of film or audio tape, the algorithmic operations that underpin information processing happen at a level that has no immediate correlate to the human perceptual system. Humans had created a non-human realm that made obsolete any idea of art based on the sense apparatus. And this turn of events was related to the way in which technologies of the information age severed any tangible connection with human existence beyond what pertains to the control practices of capitalist superpowers, notably warfare, surveillance and superficial entertainment or visual "eyewash". 2 Yet, against Kittler's bleak description of posthuman technologies it could be argued that information will still necessarily have to be processed by human bodies-even if the interaction between the human perceptual

Within the systems of artistic curation, it is generally agreed that there is a shift taking place. It is a shift in the roles of the curator, artwork, and viewer, which are increasingly intertwined and inter-mediated. With the advent of hybridized artistic activities, the definitions of art, artist and curator are being blurred and therefore we must fundamentally reconsider traditional exhibition practices which would isolate them into separate activities and order them into hierarchies. In order to understand how to address this shift, we might begin with the work of Architectural theorist and critic, Sylvia Lavin. In her text, Kissing Architecture, Lavin describes the root of the shift as a reaction to Clement Greenberg's style of modernist contemplation where the "spirit of modernity was revealed when the viewer's response to an object was purely and laboriously cognitive without affect" (18). When the world began to recognize the biases inherent in that style of aestheticism (namely its hierarchical patriarchal and imperialist tendencies which ignore alternative viewpoints), there arose a need for a different type of approach. With Greenberg's Modernist aesthetic epitomized by architecture, Lavin suggests that this new approach may be connected to characteristics of media art-primarily in its ability to layer and create "slippage" with older forms of practice. Introducing this premise, she writes:

Art is always to some extent a product of the environment; it is a response to the challenges on the part of its cultural and social, as well as its technological milieu. The state of a civilization's development of the environment has a great impact on the social awareness, and thus it shapes artistic practices, as we are permanently and thoroughly changed by our own inventions . Processes of transformation resulting from technological development nowadays, create a completely new and widened human environment, where biosphere is united into one with techno--sphere.