Antoinette LaFarge: Projects

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WRITING Writing makes up a large part of my practice. Collected here are essays, scripts, fiction, poetry, and other texts. My essays focus especially on performance and role-play aspects of Internet culture. Many of the scripts listed here are derived in part from collaborative textual improvisations in the online role-playing environments known as MOOs. From this work I have also developed a number of related projects, such as the graphic novel Cake of the Desert and I Object, a web-based word-art project. I have also worked in an editorial capacity, most recently as Associate Editor for Searching for Sebald. Earlier, I served for four years (1995-98) as guest editor for Leonardo's annual issue on the New York Digital Salon. Entries are colorcoded with bullets as follows: •essays •scripts •fiction. *"The eternal form of the absolute is god. The protean form of the absolute is art."*		downloadable pdfs "25 Propositions on the Art of Networlds" "WinSide Out: An Introduction to the Convergence of Computers, Games, and Art" "Cylex" "The Roman Forum Project"
• "All That Is Beyond Hearing: A Life of Arturo Ott" 2007. In Searching for Sebald (Los Angeles: ICI Press, 2007). "Combining playful self-referentiality with a deep sense of mystery and melancholy, it is by turns hilarious and troubling, and genuinely 'Sebaldian' in its unsettling power" (Jonathan Long, Source, Spring 2008).
• "A Meditation on Virtual Kinesthesia" 2007. Dialogue with Robert Allen in Extensions: The Online Journal of Embodiment and Techology
• "Media Commedia" 2005. Essay on The Roman Forum Project 2003 in Leonardo 38:3. Co-authored with Robert Allen.
• "25 Thesen über die Kunst der Netzwelten" 2004. Translation of "25 Propositions on the Art of Networlds" (2002), in Die Anthologie der Kunst, DuMont Verlag, Cologne, Germany. Downloadable PDF [English]
"Lament of the Repubocracy" January 2004. Performance video with accompanying introduction in web publication Horizon Zero, Issue 13: Perform, published by Banff New Media Institute.
• "The Roman Forum Project" 2003. Script for mixed-reality performance work that premiered at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA. Complete script (web page).Downloadable PDF.
• "Reading Frankenstein" 2003. Co-author (with Annie Loui) of script for multimedia performance work that premiered at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA. Script excerpt.
• "An Internet Performance for the Third Millennium: The Birth of the Christ Child" 2003. Transcript of a 1999 Plaintext Players performance in which I improvised/wrote the characters 'Smoking Angel' and 'Digital-Director'. In Performance Art Journal 73. With introduction by Marlena Corcoran.
• "SHIFT-CTRL" May 2002. Essay on the 2000 exhibition "SHIFT-CTRL: Computers, Games, and Art" at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA. Co-authored with Robert Nideffer. Leonardo 35:1.
• "25 Propositions on the Art of Networlds" March 2002. Response to the question "What is your vision of a yet unknown art?" Included by invitation in The Anthology of Art, ed. Jochen Gerz, publ. on the web by Braunschweig School of Art. "Networlds resist ownership but require stewardship.". Downloadable PDF.
• "Marcel Duchamp and the Museum of Forgery" January 2002. Essay published in Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, Vol. 2, Issue 4. "The Museum of Forgery is a child of Marcel Duchamp: it nominated itself as a museum despite the fact that by many definitions it does not belong in that category at all..."
• "Stay and Play: Game Not Over" December 2000. Paper presented at U.F.R. d'Arts Plastiques et Sciences de l'Art, Université de Paris, for the ISEA Conference, Paris, France; and at the Medienforum München's "Digital Happy Hour" at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany.
• "WinSide Out: An Introduction to the Convergence of Computers, Games, and Art" November 2000. Web catalog essay for the 2000 exhibition "SHIFT-CTRL: Computers, Games, and Art" at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA. "We think of games in terms of play, but in fact they generally embody notions of efficiency that have nothing to do with the sloppiness of real play...." Downloadable PDF [1.8 mb]
• "The Roman Forum Project" 2000. Script for multimedia performance work that premiered at the Side Street Live, Los Angeles. Complete script.
• "The Memetic Museum" 1999. Paper presented at the College Art Association Conference as part of the panel "The World Wide Web and the New Art Marketplace". A version of this paper was subsquently published in Tout-Fait in 2002 under the title "Marcel Duchamp and the Museum of Forgery".
• "Still Lies Quiet Truth" 1998. Script for a performance work that premiered at Collective Unconscious, New York, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival and was included a month later in the New York Digital Salon. Poem on which script was based .
"A Lost Encyclical on Anti-Semitism" 1996. Book review in Gnosis, Spring 1999.
• "Did Anyone Bring a Word or an Ax?: Towards an Id Theater" 1996. paper presented at the 1997 College Art Association Conference as part of the panel "Cyberspace: Trojan Horse or Roman Holiday?" "Online theater is marked by loose (often episodic) structure, tangled narrative, chaotic rhythm, uncontrolled utterance, superfluous detail, and refusal to end."
• "The Bearded Lady & the Shaven Man: Mona Lisa, Meet Mona/Leo" October 1996. Essay in Leonardo 29:5. "Where L.H.O.O.Q. presented itself openly as a modified Leonardo, L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved reverses these terms and turns the Mona Lisa into a modified Duchamp."
"SLQT" 1996. Epic poem for "blast5drama", published as part of that project's web site. New York: X-Art Foundation.
• "A World Exhilarating and Wrong: Theatrical Improvisation on the Internet" October 1995. Essay in Leonardo 28:5. "The god in the machine points inexorably at the machine in god, the desire for and fear of a mechanistic universe..." [Complete essay is 43K].
• "Tidal Wavelengths" 1995. Catalog essay in Erwin Redl, Parallel Doubt on the Distinction Between Truth and Beauty. Published in Germany.
• "The Cake of the Desert" 1995. Graphic novel. New York: Haifisch Press. More on this project.
"The Black Box" 1995. New York: Haifisch Press. Boxed set of booklets, including: "Christmas: Ein Schauspiel" (scenario); "The Christmas Scenarios" (selected scenarios); "The DownUnderworld" (performance transcript); "The Parasolitude of Memory" (performance transcript); "The Clam-Shaped Iceberg with the Lettuce-Green Hearts of Palm" (performance transcript); and "Dome's Hitech MOO Recorder" (MOO program).
"It's 'Live' Spelled Backwards" Summer 1994. Review in Gnosis. Co-authored with R.H. Allen.
• "Cylex" May 1994. Lexical fiction, published in Wired 2.04. Downloadable PDF
• "Big Man, Little Man" 1994. Limited-edition performance text, published in "Blast 4:Bioinformatica". New York: X-Art Foundation.
• "The Best of the Beast" Summer 1992. Essay in Gnosis. Co-authored with R.H. Allen.
• "The Dadashop Quartet" 1991. Experimental composition for four unaccompanied voices incorporating original material plus text fragments from Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Sol LeWitt's letters. More on this project.