alafarge@uci.edu
information
Professor of Digital Media, Art Department, UC Irvine
Associate Director, UCI Game Culture and Technology Lab
Affiliated Faculty, Center in Law, Society, and Culture, UCI
Asociate Dean for Graduate Affairs, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, UCI (2009-2012)
Short bio
Antoinette LaFarge has a particular interest in constructed realities, including computer-mediated performance, net-based improvisation, online role-playing games, avatar performance, playable media, nonlinear narrative, fictive art, and geofiction. Recent new media performance and installation projects include Galileo in America (2012), Hangmen Also Die (2010), Playing the Rapture (2008), Demotic (2004, 2006), The Roman Forum Project (2003), and Reading Frankenstein (2003). She has co-curated two groundbreaking exhibitions on computer games and art: "ALT+CTRL: A Festival of Independent and Alternative Games" (2003) and "SHIFT-CTRL: Computers, Games, and Art" (2000) at UC Irvine's Beall Center for Art and Technology.
She is the founder and longtime artistic director of the Plaintext Players, a pioneering Internet performance troupe founded in 1993 that has appeared at numerous international venues, including the 1997 Venice Biennale, documenta X, and UpStage festivals. She is also the founder and director of the Museum of Forgery, a virtual institution dedicated to opening up the cultural dialogue around forgery and related practices such as appropriation.
She is associate editor of the anthology Searching for Sebald (ICI Press, 2007), to which she is also a contributor. Other recent publications include "Eisbergfreistadt: The Fictive and the Sublime" (Visual Communication Quarterly, 2009), "A Meditation on Virtual Kinesthesia" (Extensions, 2007), "Media Commedia" (Leonardo, 2005), "25 Propositions on the Art of Networlds" (Anthology of Art, 2002), and "Marcel Duchamp and the Museum of Forgery" (Tout-Fait, 2002). From 1995 to 1998 she served as Guest Editor of the annual Digital Salon issue of Leonardo.
She is a longtime Associate of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit that explores the visual methods used to document, categorize, expose, and conceal the events that define contemporary culture. Her involvement with the ICI includes co-organizing exhibitions, design and production of several books combining scholarship with art, and work on multi-year projects such as The AIDS Chronicles In 2011, she produced the research project and exhibition Evidence of Evidence at the ICI.
Short cv
download a brief CV (pdf)
Please email me (alafarge at uci dot edu) for an up-to-date CV.
Teaching
As a faculty member in electronic art and design at UC Irvine since 1999, she has taught a range of courses, including (at the undergraduate level) Programming for Artists, World Building, Interactive Narrative, Digital Type and Communication, The Graphic Novel, Hypermedia, Digital Aesthetics, Performance and Persona, Interdisciplinary Digital Art, and Artists as Writers. Graduate courses include Critique Group, Colloquium, Appropriation Art & Ownership Seminar, Virtual Identity Seminar, and Research & Writing Seminar. More about the electronic art and design area and courses.