Both a practitioner and critic of new media and computation, Marc Lafia founded Art+Culture.com, a net-based archive and exploratorium of contemporary art and culture, in 1998.
Art+Culture.com amounted to one of the first art-oriented archival tools of the early internet age and brought Lafia notable recognition in the arts community after winning SXSW’s Best in Show award in 2000.
[5] Lafia’s essays on the topics of new media art, computational cinema, and the nature of the image have been published in Artforum International, Digital Creativity, Eyebeam.org, and Film and Philosophy Journal.
[8] Marc Lafia’s early creative works were in the fields of 16mm filmmaking, advertising, screenwriting for feature films, and music videos as a writer in Hollywood.
Lafia was also a writer and conceptualist for Don Henley’s End of the Innocence (1990), winner of the MTV Best Male Performer award, and wrote a version for Michael Jackson’s Black or White (1991).
Throughout the 1990s, Lafia shifted his focus to visual art, creating works such as The Vanndemar Memex or Lara Croft Stripped Bare by Her Assassins, Even (1999) and Ambient Machines (2000).
The work was heralded for its ambition to challenge fixed temporal constraints, particularly within the realm of cinema, and cemented Lafia’s computational direction throughout his career.
ID Magazine wrote of Art+Culture: “In 1981, the manic visionary Ted Nelson predicted the development of a giant database of ideas from around the world, cross-listed and cross-linked, called Xanadu.
In a way, the web made Nelson’s prophecy a reality, but the ambitious artandculture site makes it beautiful.”[1] Red Herring wrote: “a new website, artandculture.com, makes the elusive realm of sensibility visible … a machine that discovers accidents, creating art as it goes.”[11] While Lafia’s cyberpunk works from the 1990s were based on interactivity and built of code and screens, his continuing art practice would include new works using a great array of fabrics and plastics as nods to fragility and the precarious.
Starring Bruce Ramsay as Hilbert, Exploding Oedipus chronicles a young man struck by bohemia and sexually and psychologically coming to know himself.
Permutations was a series of multi-screen films that Lafia produced once per day with a Canon Xapshot digital camera over a period of several years, starting in 2005.
744 hours in length, the film investigates power dynamics, shared authorship, and distributed editorial control through its computational analysis of the underlying historical events.
Love & Art (2006) involved diary elements, documentary storytelling, and tragic narrative in shadowing a Park Slope, Brooklyn family and deploying recordings captured from their daily lives and travels.
The film was well-received, credited with highlighting how “our desires have become distributed, exploded into images … and over screens, our eyes relentlessly drop to view.”[18] 27 (2015) centers on James English Leary, a 27-year-old artist, engaged in candid conversation with Lafia in his studio.
Marc Lafia moved to San Francisco after his time in Hollywood, which influenced his initial close reading of photography at the beginning of his career.
The Anatomy of Pictures revived the focus of materiality, infusing natural elements onto photographs representing André Malraux's virtual museum.
[7] Lafia's essays on the topics of new media art, computational cinema, and the nature of the image have been published in Artforum International, Digital Creativity, Eyebeam.org, and Film and Philosophy Journal.
In recent years, Marc Lafia has been a guest lecturer on subjects such as urban planning and intellectual inquiry at the Shanghai Art Academy; the New School; and NYU Tisch.
In Eternal Sunshine, exhibited at the Minsheng Museum of Art, print and video works reflected network culture’s restructuring of the subject and self in contemporary society.
Lafia has used blackboards as a fixture of his work throughout China, exhibitions that solicited audience feedback, creativity, and self-expression publicly as a micro-manifestation of social media networks and posting rituals.