Antoinette LaFarge: About

ABOUT MY WORK
My work slides along the boundaries of familiar categories, questioning normative production in such modes as "fiction" and "performance". I work with both traditional and digital media, although nearly all my projects are heavily computer-mediated and many require a computational infrastructure. Areas of special inquiry include impersonation and improvisation, mixed realities, constructed narrative, technology-mediated performance, games, online role-play and avatarism, fictive art, and design for communication. Many recent projects have involved networked performance and computer role-playing environments. Below is more information about my key areas of investigation.

IMPERSONATION + IDENTITY
Many of my works consider what happens when you assume a different identity, either temporarily or over a long period. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." How do we decide what constitutes a 'real' identity as opposed to an impersonation or a performance? Who has the right to police these categories? What social and psychological forces contribute to the enormous popular engagement in online role-play through avatars? Projects exploring this area include avatar-driven performance works such as The Roman Forum Project 2003, Demotic, The Roman Forum 2000, and Virtual Live. I engage the subject from another angle in my long-running Museum of Forgery project, in which I assume the cultural role and authority of a museum. Writings related to this subject include "All That Is Beyond Hearing", "A Meditation on Virtual Kinesthesia", "Marcel Duchamp and the Museum of Forgery", "25 Propositions on the Art of Networlds", and "The Bearded Lady & the Shaven Man".

IMPROVISATION + PERFORMANCE
American ideas about performance are largely driven by conventional notions of Aristotelian narrative adopted from the narrow model favored by both Hollywood and mainstream theater. My performance projects aim to unpack cultural assumptions about what constitutes valid performance, exploring such areas as the role of technology as a cultural signifier of the good ("Reading Frankenstein", "The Roman Forum Project 2003"), methods of engaging the political dimension of performance ("Playing the Rapture", "The Roman Forum Project 2003", "Galileo in America", "The Roman Forum 2000", "Demotic", "SLQT"); improvisation as a means of challenging audience expectations of a controlled experience ("Demotic", b>"The Roman Forum 2000"), and the modular script as way to undo linear narrative ("Playing the Rapture", "The Roman Forum Project 2003", "Galileo in America", "The Roman Forum 2000", "Demotic", "SLQT"). Most of these projects require special-purpose programming of interface or media elements (e.g. text-to-speech effects). Writings related to this subject include "Media Commedia", "A Meditation on Virtual Kinesthesia", "Did Anyone Bring a Word or an Axe?", and "A World Exhilarating and Wrong".

GAMES + ART
I am interested both in games and gamelike activities such as impersonation, culture jamming, forgery, and fictive art. As the preceding list indicates, I am especially interested in what one might term 'stealth games'; that is, works that do not immediately announce themselves as games or that actively conceal themselves under another rubric. I have co-curated two early, groundbreaking exhibitions on games and art: SHIFT-CTRL (2000) and ALT+CTRL (2004), both of which included a number of artists and game-makers who have since risen to cultural prominence. At UC Irvine, I am Associate Director of the Game Culture and Technology Lab, which was one of the sponsors of ALT+CTRL. Writings related to this subject include "WinSide Out", "SHIFT-CTRL", "Stay and Play", and "Marcel Duchamp and the Museum of Forgery"

CONSTRUCTED NARRATIVE
A great deal of my work involves creating narrative in unusual and often circuitous ways. I tend toward forms that complicate reading by playing with convention; for example, one of my fictions, "Cylex", takes the form of an encyclopedia of slang from the near future. I am particularly interested in constructing systems to generate narrative, and in improvising narrative by various means, including role-play. For example, large parts of the scripts of my major performance works ("Demotic", "The Roman Forum Project 2003", "The Roman Forum 2000", "SLQT") were generated through online role-playing environments. They reflect my deep interest in the multithreaded dialogue characteristic of live chat environments, a novel aspect of net-era language use that I have addressed at length in several essays ("A World Exhilarating and Wrong", "Did Anyone Bring a Word or an Axe?", "Stay and Play")

DESIGN + COMMUNICATION
I have a strong interest in design as a communication tool. I have designed several books (Searching for Sebald, Benjamin's Blind Spot, Bataille's Eye), in each case trying to structure the book to reflect key concepts being put forward in the book itself. I have also produced numerous artist's books, including a graphic novel (The Cake of the Desert) and a unique version of the I Ching. I have designed numerous websites, focusing on such fundamental but often-overlooked features as ease of updating by nonexperts and broad cross-platform and backwards compatibility. Since the early 1990s, I have designed several Type 1 PostScript fonts, often with a specific end use in mind. My design work also encompasses sets for various choreographers and theatrical posters.

COLLABORATION
I have been fortunate to collaborate with remarkable individuals on many of my projects. I am a long-standing Associate of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, where I have worked on numerous ICI projects with other artists and curators, including Lise Patt, Christel Dillbohner, Deborah Cullen, Lothar Schmitz, Axel Forrester, Dorothy Cross, and Skuta. Director Robert Allen has been the co-creator of most of my performance projects for the last decade; we have worked with sound artists Cuca Esteves, Jeff Ridenour, and Philip White; video artist Amy Kaczur; many talented actors; and the Plaintext Players, whose roster has included Ursula Endlicher, Marlena Corcoran, and Heather Wagner, among others. In other performance works I have teamed up with director Annie Loui, scientist Jim Fallon, and choreographers Heidi Duckler and Gary Palmer. UCI professor Robert Nideffer co-curated SHIFT-CTRL and ALT+CTRL with me, and Georgia Tech professor Celia Pearce joined us on ALT+CTRL; for these projects I worked with Aureia Harvey and Michael Samyn, Brody Condon, Rebecca Allen, Perry Hoberman, RTMark, Mongrel, Eddo Stern, Natalie Bookchin, Negativland, Jodi.org, Ken Feingold, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Grahame Weinbren, Adriene Jenik, Lev Manovich, Norman Klein, Eric Zimmerman, and many others.