Ralston Farina Archive
The complete archive of Ralston Farina, a Downtown New York performance artist as well as experimental mathematician and computer scientist. Farina was known for producing experimental works in the 1970s and 1980s, especially those that involved concepts of time and its experience. A computer scientist who studied at Princeton and Stanford, and worked with Xerox, 3M, and other technology corporations, Farina’s research focused on computer-generated artwork, artificial intelligence, and the study of time as a mathematical concept. His performances and persona were well-known contemporaneously by other experimental artists including John Cage and the community of The Poetry Project and Artists Space, as well as galleries such as Paula Cooper and Holly Solomon, but because of his insistence that recording or documenting his work was antithetical to his approach to time, his methods have been largely invisible to researchers and his contributions uncited. This archive, which remained with his friends from the mid-1980s until present moment, offers the first such opportunity for researchers to explore a comprehensive collection of the artist’s processes and practices, including correspondence, professional files, performance notes and drawings, mathematical and scientific research, sculptures, audio/visual items (that have been professionally digitized), and objects used in performances and for the creation of “time objects.”
The archive is available. Please contact us for detailed inventory and price.