the livingblog

Los Angeles is one of, if not the most, prolific content-generating cities in the US (if not the world!). But did you know that UCLA has a Center for Digital Humanties and New Media? They have a manifesto and everything! The Center’s “mission page” is full of questions to lead one down a conceptual rabbit hole, not least of which is the following:

Because of…profound changes in the manner in which cultural artifacts are produced and circulate, we must ask: How will discursive practices change as researchers think about ways to use multimedia creatively as resources for their scholarship and teaching?

Well, on May 4th, Lynn will be appearing at the Center, along with Henrik Bennetsen and Jeffrey Schnapp, to present on “The Animated Archive and Virtual Worlds”. The discussion will focus on Lynn’s recent project, Life Squared, which remixes The Dante Hotel (1973-4), widely considered one of the first (if not the first) site-specific artworks, and Roberta Breitmore (1971-8), a “performance in real life, using real materials, experience, and real time”.

Roberta Breitmore (second life iteration)

For more information about Life Squared, complete with voice-over explanation by Lynn herself, check out The Hotel That Time Built: The Regenerated Dante Hotel, Phase 1 (2007).

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And we stumbled upon Orange Photography stumbling upon Lynn. Actually Orange is the new green. Anyway the image above is a crop of a nice pic of Lynn’s recent show at Gallery Paul Anglim.

An exhibition of electronic, digital, and web-based art titled Tech Tools of the Trade: Contemporary New Media Art has just opened at the de Saisset Museum at the University of Santa Clara.

The exhibition examines our cultural fascination with technology (including our continued faith in its benefits), our myriad uses of the internet, as well as the potentially troubling applications of technology in simulation and surveillance.

The exhibit will be open from April 17 to June 28, 2009. Why do we tell you this? Because for you Bay Area people this is a chance to see Lynn’s work in real life. Yay!

The gallery that represents Lynn, bitforms, has just sent out a press release regarding the Guggenheim Fellowship that Lynn was just awarded. We can’t yet read the release on the bitforms site, but it is available on Artipedia.

See also nice mentions of the award at the Henry Art Gallery’s Blog and Sf 360.

So according to the headline over at Chicken and Egg (see image above), Lynn has been awarded one of these fellows from the Guggenheim. But the story doesn’t say which one she picked. Or perhaps they are all clones of one person. This would make sense as they all seem to be aping each other after all. Anyway thanks to Chicken and Egg for picking up on this story. You really are great peeps!  (Get it? ;-)

“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy” once said poet and critic Dorothy Parker.

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We are shouting and screaming and jumping up and down on our desks (well, metaphorically speaking anyway). Over on the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation web site, president Edward Hirsch announced today that in its eighty-fifth annual competition for the United States and Canada the Foundation has awarded Lynn Hershman Leesen a fellowship for 2009.

The release defines the qualifications for a fellowship:  “Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment.”  The purpose of the Foundation is to “add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding.”

Lynn was very pleased with the result, saying “yes, the miracle is – it is true.”

Performing Presence: from the live to the simulated was an international and interdisciplinary forum for the exploration of how exchanges of practices, concepts and methodologies between art, performance and new media practitioners, between academic disciplines and between live, mediated and simulated performance may deepen an understanding of the performance of presence. This was an international conference held at the Centre for Intermedia, University of Exeter, UK, 26-29 March 2009. Lynn Hershman Leeson contributed to the keynote event through a Second Life apparition.

Key questions for the conference included:

• What are the chief signifiers of presence?
• How is presence achieved through theatrical performance?
• What makes a memory come alive and live again?
• How are practices of presence connected with senses of self and identity?
• Is presence synonymous with ‘being in the moment’?
• What is the nature of the ‘co-presence’ of audience and performer?
• Does presence imply distance?
• Where does performance practice end and its documentation begin?
• In what tense does documentation take place? * Can technology produce presence?
• Is presence a form of immersion?
• Is documentation theory or practice?
• What happens when documentation becomes time-based and ephemeral?
• Where does practice end and its documentation begin?
• In what tense does documentation take place?

Now aren’t you glad that it was Lynn that had to answer these questions and not you?