Marc Lafia is an artist, filmmaker and founder of Art and Culture.com, a contextual engine to the arts. His work is an exploration of the narrative systems of books, films, photography and network media, re-considering and re-presenting such systems as procedural machines of authoring and reading. From feature and experimental films to digital art, he explores how discourse constructs itself. His early films,
auto-re-tour and
fini-la guerre, investigate the tensions between narrativity and the pure surface of film. As the machines of discourse move between signification systems and systems of rhythm, sound and image, they begin to oscillate between operations of chance and discrete narrativity, between signification and the slippage of signification. Yet these operations of play and slippage remain bound by the medium and its constraints and limits. Lafia's most recent work in net art includes
Hyper Hyper, the
World Picture Clock and the
Vanndemar Memex or Laura Croft Stripped Bare by her Assassins, Even explore simultaneity, juxtaposition, ambience, and authorship as the discourse moves from machines to engines; engines capable of producing infinite variations of themselves. The engines move simultaneously in multiple temporal directions enabling continuous authoring and reading against and within the vast archives of both personal and collective networks. These open works, constructed in the space of the net, catalyze a new kind of work, engines that relentlessly re-write and construct themselves, their authorship and history.
Art Entertainment Network, Marc Lafia, February 2000.
