The Event of Art

    NEW YORK, NY, September 09, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Punctum Books, the open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing, is proud to announce the release of The Event of Art: a seminal publication on the work of artist, filmmaker, and author Marc Lafia.

The book interweaves essays, notes, photographic archives, and a host of exhibitions wherein Lafia traverses his wide body of work examining the cultural landscape as it moves from analog to digital. Lafia's work emerges with remix and network culture as it changes our relationship to knowledge, ourselves, our memories, and our bodies: from one of representation to presentation, and from contemplation to new modes of embodiment, producing new subjectivities and new ways of going in the world. In front of us now is not the image but rather the protocols and interfaces to a networked culture, ever re-mixable and variable. Through fifty two modular chapters and over eight hundred pages and images, Lafia takes us from his computational works to his later interest in the realm of the sensible and sensate. Here he presents art as the medium itself, giving us wide permission to explore and examine our deepest feelings and senses, our world and its becoming.

The book is introduced by two essays: the first by curator and art dealer Mathieu Borysevicz recounting meeting Lafia at his first and only artist residency after spending years in Hollywood as a screenwriter and film director (working with Madonna, Michael Jackson, David Fincher, writing early drafts of Judge Dread, Iron Man, Software and others) and then Silicon Valley (as founder of artandculture.com). Borysevicz recounts Lafia's tracing of media archaeology from the VCR to MTV to computation to network culture. He details the many projects he produced for Lafia, including the participatory works done at the Shanghai Financial Center and the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale. In his essay, Borysevicz introduces Lafia's interest in recording as it becomes digital and computational where "recording is not only memory, and a data structure, but a permutational instrument and ever-changing horizon of iterations." In the second essay, critic Daniel Coffeen writes, "while Lafia may not have a traditional medium – (there is no such thing anymore) – he does in fact have one consistent medium: imaging making itself, its apparati of creation, consumption, and circulation. In fact Lafia's medium is the discourse of art – what it is, how it comes to be, how we experience it."

The Event of Art presents art as a complex material and societal event. The event is multiple, a continual becoming of perception, being, materiality, participation, a coming to the senses and the making, shaping and opening to them, not only of oneself, but the world becoming.

For more information: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-event-of-art/

Marc Lafia is an American artist, author and filmmaker. He is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate, the ZKM, and exhibited at the Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, Anthology Film Archives, International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Minsheng Museum of Art in Shanghai, and The Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale 2014, among other venues. He has taught at Stanford University, the San Francisco Art Institute, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University. His previous books Image Photograph (2015) and Everyday Cinema (2017) are published by Punctum.

Punctum Books, https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-event-of-art/ originally founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2011, and with editorial offices in Santa Barbara (USA) and The Hague (Netherlands), is anindependent, not-for-profit, public benefit corporation registered in Santa Barbara, California.We are an open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiryand writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage (in which assemblage you will findhumanists keeping rowady and thought-provoking company with social scientists, scientists,multi/media specialists, artists, architects, and designers). We have a special fondness for neotraditional and unconventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academicnorms, with a special emphasis on books that fall lengthwise between the article and themonograph–id est, novellas, in one sense or another. We also take in strays of any variety. Thisis a space for the imp-orphans of your thoughts and pen, an ale-serving church for littlevagabonds.

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