the livingblog

Will you be in upstate New York at the beginning of April? If so, try and stop by and see Lynn. She will be participating in the Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large Campus Visits and Events at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY with a  campus visit from April 5 to 10, 2009. On Tuesday, April 7, 7:15 pm at the Schwartz Performing Arts Center there will be an informal film screening of The Formerly Secret History of the Feminist Art – rough cuts from Lynn’s latest project; run time: 80 minutes. On Wednesday, April 8 at the Johnson Museum of Art, 2L Lecture Room, 4:30 pm, there will be a  film screening of Strange Culture, run time: 75 minutes.

Michael Shanks, the Omar and Althea Dwyer Hoskins Professor of Classical Archaeology at Stanford University recently updated his home page (or here). In doing so he acknowledges the “privilege of working with Lynn”. Michael, you are not alone…

We’ve added a lot of new pages to the web site today. These pages contains the canonical or “official” biography and curriculum vitae for Lynn. Separate pages cover exhibits, bibliography, film and video history and much, much more. We have great plans with these page. The data will be used to update her imdb page and her Wikipedia entry and all the other updateable places where you find Lynn. In fact, if you write about Lynn and want accurate up-to-date reference material on Lynn, please do feel free to copy and paste data from this page. And please don’t forget to let people know where you obtained the data.

We should point out one thing about this biography. It was written for paper. Boo! But we plan to update it for the Internet. Yay!

What this means is that words such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will magically turn into San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

It will take some time to do to do all the updates the pages. And even more time to get those updates out to the other sites. If you would like to help please let us know.

Lynn was recently interviewed by claire_w at interventtech. One thing to notice is that interview is particularly well edited and crafted as a blog post. The post is full of links. There are four relevant images. The vertical spacing and titling are well thought out. It all makes for a fast and effective read. And, of course, the content is great because it’s all about our favorite topic: what Lynn is doing and thinking about these days.

This interview was itself the result of interviews.  In Curing the Vampire a broadcast by Lynn that was commissioned by Kelli Dipple, curator of the Tate Intermedia Art program, Lynn undertakes a set of interviews posing questions to a selection of guests, including a politician, journalist, scientist and lawyer: Gilberto Gil, Elena Poniatowska, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Lawrence Lessig. The interviews are shot in a range of locations around the world and in the virtual world of Second Life.

In anticipation of Lynn’s new film Women Art Revolution and a number of other exciting things that Lynn is involved with in 2009, it’s time to pick up the pace and scope of Lynn’s presence on the web:

Some of the things we’d like to accomplish with lynnhershman.com are:

• Allow search engines to read the site and index its content
• Adapt the site to a mix of HTML and Flash
• Allow links to direct you to individual pages in the site
• Enable quicker, easier navigation of site
• All of this in a continuation of the style of the current site

On the other hand there are many aspects of the current web site that are both admirable and iconic of the era of the web sites creation. When the time comes we will archive the existing site by moving it to a special location (it might be www.lynnhershman.com/2007) . In this way all the talent and devotion that went into the current site will be preserved and honored.

In building the new web site, we propose grafting on the new bits while the patient is alive and kicking. In other words many of the changes will be gradual and publicly visible,

We will start by using this blog ( www.lynnhershman.com/livingblog) as the repository for new or updated content. The new content will be presented to you in pages available from the side menu. We may be able to use these pages to demo some of the new look as well. By using the text editing capability of the blog we hope to bring more new of what’s happening in Lynn’s life faster than ever before.

If there is a central concept or paradigm for the new web site is that it should be a foyer or portal to her work. You come to this web site to see where she is being exhibited, or to learn about her next appearance to research body of work, or to double-click on some of the back story on a particular film or piece. Of course the site will be good looking, but the intention is not to create a work of art in the basic site – the intention is to make a site that an effective base for you to access and learn about Lynn and her work.

You will, however, be able to access Lynn’s work from the main site. And on these separate pages and sites you will be able to experience Lynn’s work as works of art.

During the course of the construction we will be using this blog to inform you of new features on the site and, of course, to inform you about the latest news and updates on Lynn and her career.