Marc Lafia
1955–
Marc Lafia (b. 1955; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores how network culture changes our relationship to knowledge, memories, and our bodies, producing new subjectivities and ways of interacting with the world. For Lafia, computation and algorithmic procedures allow for the production of new structures of organizing image and information, as well as new ways of distributing affects and emotions. Lafia’s works have been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Online; ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Anthology Film Archives, New York; International Film Festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands; and in China at the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, and the 2014 Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale. He has taught in California at Stanford University, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, as well as at Pratt Institute and Columbia University in New York.
Introduction
Marc Lafia (born November 21, 1955) is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, photographer, writer, educator, and information architect. He is known for his contributions to the intersection of art, film, and technology. Lafia’s works explore computation and the impact of network culture on media, communication, and the self.
Lafia’s commissioned films and multi-screen computational installations have been featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minnesota; the Tate Online: Intermedia Art; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Karlsruhe, Germany; NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), Tokyo, Japan; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
Both a practitioner and critic of new media and computation, Marc Lafia founded Art+Culture.com, a net-based archive and exploratorium of contemporary art and culture, in 1998. Art+Culture.com amounted to one of the first art-oriented archival tools of the early internet age and brought Lafia notable recognition in the arts community after winning SXSW’s Best in Show award in 2000.
As a visual artist, Lafia has focused on the mediums of drawing, painting, sculpting, and photography. Lafia’s photographic works are located in real and material exhibition galleries around the world, as well as in non-local emergent net galleries. Lafia has exhibited multiple works in China, starting with his solo show Eternal Sunshine at the Minsheng Museum, the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, the Guangdong Museum of Art, and Shanghai’s BANK Gallery.
As a performance artist, Lafia has directed and produced several stage pieces. He is known for blending visual projections, music and recordings, and dance. Lafia’s most notable performance pieces include Everything is Everything and There is Nothing Else (2019) and The Practicing Human (2023). Through narratives that span several years and time periods, Lafia's performance pieces explore temporal perceptions across cultures and investigate how diverse concepts of time shape worldviews, social dynamics, and collectivity.
Marc Lafia has lectured and taught courses and graduate seminars on film directing, acting for the camera, new media art practices, philosophy, and methods at Stanford University; San Francisco Art Institute; California Institute of the Arts; Pratt Institute of Design; Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California; New York Film Academy; and Columbia University. Lafia’s essays on the topics of new media art, computational cinema, and the nature of the image have been published in Artforum International, Digital Creativity, Eyebeam.org, and Film and Philosophy Journal. He has also published three books with Punctum Books: Image Photograph (2015), Everyday Cinema (2017), and The Event of Art (2020).
Marc Lafia resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Accessed October 25, 2026.
Exhibitions & projects
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to internet art and its online gallery space for commissions of net art.