About the book

The Tics of Appearance – after Paul Virilio. The entire text of The Aesthetics of Disappearance has been digitally scanned and the words systematically removed leaving just punctuation.

About the Author

Nola Farman is an artist and writer with a diverse practice including large scale public artworks, environmental works, installations, video, sound, sensors, small sculpture, painting, drawing, and artists books. She has received many commissions, grants, awards and, residencies.

Farman currently writes short, satirical fiction that uses the artworld as a microcosm mirroring the absurdity of contemporary life in the world at large. The art world reflects the worst and the best on planet earth. What is the place of art in a world that has come to be seen in global terms of horror and inequality? Compromise?  Aesthetic principles concede to mediocrity. However, this does not inhibit the art market, which is voracious, and in its own right, a creative force to be reckoned with. 

In a refined sense of the ridiculous Farman’s texts upend the conventional logic of how art should be viewed, seeming at first to be an unnatural distortion. But satire is a weapon in an honourable struggle to show things in a new light. It is an attempt to turn the compost of art production and asymmetrical encounters, to make way for new cultural growth and alternative art practice in which play is a deadly serious pursuit.

From the blurb by Pam Brown

“Nola Farman has manifested an actual appearance of disappearance in her alteration of Paul Virilio's 20th century text The Aesthetics of Disappearance - a book which presented his conception of  'picnolepsy' - an epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed's gaps, jolts and glitches that when blended with politics defines a society of speed.   By gradually and methodically removing nouns then verbs from Virilio's sentences Farman leads us further into absence. Pages of scattered conjunctions and articles follow, eventually declining into punctuation where floating tics appear as commas and, then, inevitably, a remaining full stop. This work, in bringing Virilio up to speed, enacts our loss for words under a dizzying proliferation of hyperfast algorithms in this infinitely distracted 21st century.”

Pam Brown, author of Click here for what we do and Stasis Shuffle.

Other works by Nola Farman

The Humours of the Artists’ Book (PhD). www.nolafarman1.com. 

From 1999 to 2018 Nola made limited handmade edition books with The Garden Path Press: Microbilia; More Microbilia; The Book of Dark Pages By Nora Fleming; The Elevator Rider's Companion; Out Damn Spot!; Flutter; Readymade Performance; From Here to There and Back Again; Six Hours in the Life of a Paris Bench; Parking Places I Could Have Had if I Had Needed a Parking Place in Paris; The Appearance; Silent Reading; The Day the Sydney Tower Followed Me; Eavesdropping: theFrustrated Narrative; The Ministry for the Future of Art; Unadulterated;  Kulinaria: recipes for disaster; Annotated Volume One – Anna Soror, Marguerite Yourcenar and, Annotated Volume Two – Le Chef-d’Oeuvre, Honoré de Balzac.

Farman’s handmade books are in the collections of: Artexte, Montréal, Canada; Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg; National Library of Australia – Printed Australiana; University of the West of England, Bristol, UK; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Library; Yale University, Library, USA; MOMA Library, NY; The Tate Britain Library, UK; Winchester School of Art, UK; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Te Papa National Gallery New Zealand; Canterbury Art Gallery, New Zealand; Centre for Artist Books, Pays-Paysage, St Yriex-de-Perche, France; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France; the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK and, Jessie Street National Women’s Library, Sydney.

Readings and lectures

Chapter 7: The E(n)tymology of Words, WayOut zoom, Kandos, NSW;

Off Track, Volumes 1-6, a series of readings from The E(n)tymology of Words at Clovelly Social House (other writers invited to also read at each session); Flight & The E(n)tymology of Words, Humboldt University, Berlin; Public presentation, The E(n)tymology of Words, Darling Foundry, Montréal. 

Public Lecture at the Visual Arts Centre, La Trobe University, Bendigo, Victoria, “How to Read an Artists’ Book;” the 3rd International Conference of the Book, “The Future of the Book,” Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK and, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) The Ministry for the Future of Art and a Feminist Manifesto.