Antoinette LaFarge home | about | projects | writing | playback | design | events | teaching | info GAMES I am interested both in games and gamelike activities such as impersonation, culture jamming, pranks, 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. My essays on games can be found in the 'writing' area.

Game Culture & Technology Lab I am an Associate Director of this lab at UC Irvine. The lab sponsored the ALT+CTRL game show and has served as the development site and/or host for a number of unique game-related projects.

ALT+CTRL 2004 was a unique festival of independent and alternative games, showcasing the most innovative new concepts in computer games by independent developers, artists, and game modders. Not unlike the Sundance Film Festival, ALT+CTRL seeks to cultivate a vibrant, independent game community and highlight novel experiments in game design, game genres, methodologies, and approaches to game play. ALT+CTRL is a sequel to the ground-breaking exhibition SHIFT-CTRL (see below). I co-curated ALT+CTRL with Robert Nideffer and Celia Pearce.

Reading Frankenstein 2003 was a multimedia performance work about artificial life (both computational and biological), recent research in neurological processes related to reading and perception, and Mary Shelley's classic gothic novel. The piece ends with Shelley and the Frankenstein creature navigating their way through an "Adventure"-style game version of the last pages of the novel.

SHIFT-CTRL 2000 was the first major North American exhibition to examine how artists work with games, gaming, and related technologies. SHIFT-CTRL included a mix of installations and networked pieces, looking critically yet playfully at how games have been altering social systems as they emerge to occupy cultural center stage. The exhibition's three featured areas--Role-Playing Games and Shared Social Spaces; Evolvable/Emergent Systems; and World Hacks/Rewriting Existing Worlds--included work by such artists as Rebecca Allen; Perry Hoberman; RTMark; Mongrel; Eddo Stern; Natalie Bookchin; Negativland; Jodi.org; Ken Feingold; Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau; Grahame Weinbren; Lisa Brenneis and Adriene Jenik; Janine Cirincione and Michael Ferraro; Jane Prophet, Gordon Selley, and Mark Hurry; Lev Manovich and Norman Klein; and Eric Zimmerman, many of whom have been included in the numerous game art shows that have proliferated in the wake of SHIFT-CTRL.

Selling the Presidency on ebay As part of The Roman Forum 2000, I attempted to sell the U.S. presidency on ebay. The presidency was listed on ebay under the category "Collectibles: Political (US): Presidency" and described as a "unique object ... 210 years old and in good condition-- a real collector's item". It eventually sold for a bargain $10 million, which was then the largest amount ebay would accept as a reserve price. After the auction closed, ebay cancelled the sale. This may have been the first attempt to sell the an elective office on ebay as a prank, and it spawned a host of imitators. It was designed to draw attention to the fact that by that point in his campaign for the U.S. presidency, George W. Bush had reportedly raised on the order of $95 million from only around 800 individuals out of the entire nation. If 800 people can own the presidency, why not one?

The Museum of Forgery is a virtual institute founded in 1993 and dedicated to promoting an appreciation of the aesthetics of forgery. A number of the ideas promulgated by the Museum--such as conceptual Photoshop filters or dumping grounds for old art--have since been taken up and implemented by other artists. I am the museum's founder and director.

The Plaintext Players is a pioneering group of cyberperformers who have been creating live online improvisations since 1994. As the group's founder and artistic director, I direct many of their unique performances, which generally take the form of textual improvisations based on written scenarios. One of the longest-running groups of cyberperformers, the Players have recently been involved in creating mixed-reality works that merge cyberspace and realspace in various ways.