Bio
Antoinette LaFarge is an artist and writer with a strong interest interest in expanded narrative, feminist techne, fictive art, and ephemeral and virtual media. Her artwork has taken form as new media performance, computer-programmed installations, public interventions, digital drawings and prints, and artist's books. Her work is often based on historical research and primary source materials, with topics ranging from the Roman Republic to 19th century botanical drawing. As an author, she has written about such subjects as virtuality and its discontents, design and new media, performance, and fictive art. She holds an M.F.A. in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
She has created or co-created over two dozen original new media performance works and installations in the United States and Europe, including Far-Flung follows function (2013), Galileo in America (2012), Hangmen Also Die (2010), Playing the Rapture (2008), Demotic (2006), The Roman Forum Project (2003). She was the founder and longtime artistic director of the Plaintext Players, a pioneering Internet performance troupe founded in 1993 that appeared at numerous international venues, including the 1997 Venice Biennale, documenta X, and UpStage festivals. She co-curated two early exhibitions on computer games and art: "ALT+CTRL: A Festival of Independent and Alternative Games" (2003) and "SHIFT-CTRL: Computers, Games, and Art" (2000), both at UC Irvine's Beall Center for Art and Technology. Her work has been supported by dozens of grants, including an NEA grant for "ALT+CTRL."
Her most recent book is Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax and Provocation (DoppelHouse Press, 2019), a survey of fictive art. Her prior book, Louise Brigham and the Early History of Sustainable Furniture Design (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), was a study of one of the pioneers of contemporary green design. Her essays and fiction have been published by MIT Press, Oxford University Press, Art Journal, the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, Wired, Gnosis, and elsewhere. She is a longtime Wikipedia edtior and has contributed some 400 new entries, mostly biographies of women in the fields of art, literature, and science. She has served as a guest editor for several issues of Leonardo: the Journal of the International Society for Arts, Sciences, and Technology.
She is a longtime Associate and current Acting Director 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 printed matter, and work on multi-year projects such as The AIDS Chronicles She has designed half a dozen books for the ICI Press, including Speculative Pentimenti (2013) and Searching for Sebald (2007).
Please email her for an updated CV.teaching
Professor of Digital Media, Art Department, UC Irvine (1999-2023)
Associate Director, UCI Game Culture and Technology Lab (1999-2014)
Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, UCI (2009-2012; 2014-15)
courses
As a faculty member in Electronic Art and Design in the Art Department at UC Irvine since 1999, she taught a range of courses, including (at the undergraduate level) Programming for Artists, Issues in Techno-Arts, World Building, Interactive Narrative, Digital Type and Communication, Design for Print, The Graphic Novel, Hypermedia, Digital Aesthetics, Performance and Persona, Interdisciplinary Digital Art, and Artists as Writers. Graduate courses included Critique Group, Colloquium, Appropriation Art & Ownership Seminar, Virtual Identity Seminar, and Research & Writing Seminar.