filter the public

Empty hallway with three large, colorful display boards in blue, green, and red.
Empty corridor with colorful display boards in blue, green, and red on the wall in a modern building.
People standing in front of a red chalkboard with writing and questions about pleasure, asking what their pleasure is, who they are having dinner with, and what food they like in English and Chinese.
People writing on a large red wall in an indoor space, with luggage and handbags, while others walk by.
A boy with dark hair wearing a black and white striped shirt writing on a blue wall filled with colorful words and scribbles in various languages.
People standing in line at a green chalkboard covered with colorful drawings and writings in an indoor setting.
A man with gray hair, wearing a black jacket, is writing on a large green chalkboard covered with colorful chalk writings and drawings in multiple languages, including English and Chinese.
People observing colorful blackboards with chalk drawings in an art gallery hallway.


Marc Lafia’s participatory blackboard works transform public space into a low-tech social network, inviting viewers to share preferences, desires, and reflections in real time. These installations explore how language, interaction, and self-expression circulate as social currency, echoing the dynamics of digital platforms through analog means.

Blurring art, performance, and communication, the works reveal the fleeting, collective authorship of everyday discourse.

The project extends Lafia’s ongoing interest in rules-based systems, narration, and database logic, translating these ideas into a procedural, embodied form. The blackboard becomes an index of collective thought and feeling, where language is not fixed but continuously rewritten through interaction. As responses accumulate, overlap, and disappear, the work reveals discourse as transient and unstable—an ever-shifting network of relations that mirrors the rhythms of a technocratic, globalized society while foregrounding the human impulses—desire, curiosity, and connection—that animate it.

Art as Invention 3 (Public Relations) is an active metaphor of the social relations within our technocratic, globalized society.

Art as Invention 3, Public Relations