the livingblog

Lynn’s work defies categorization. Starting tonight, January 7, and running through April 17, an installation of Lynn’s pioneering Second Life environment and 2006 re-creation of Roberta Breitmore as an avatar will be on view as part of S.F. Camerawork’s 35th anniversary exhibition, An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area Part 2: The Future Lasts Forever.

Roberta Breitmore's avatar in Life Squared: Life to the Power of N

According to the gallery,

The Future Lasts Forever utilizes the notion of autobiography as a way to explore the work of contemporary artists who are using archival material, exploring persistent subject matter, and examining their own personal histories and the practical ways and means that surround art practice and preserve works for the future beyond the ephemeral exhibition model. To emphasize the exhibition’s autobiographical focus in egalitarian terms, accompanying text panels feature an articulation by each artist of their work. The cumulative effect of these projects serves to exemplify the evolution of a multifaceted and multicultural major American metropolitan region.

Read the rest of this entry →

As you might recall from a previous livingblog post, Lynn was featured in this year’s futurist-inspired Performa biennial of new and time-based media. Her piece Customized Marinetti (2009), which features en-masse, in-place jogging, moaning, and matching t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase IO NON SONO MARINETTI (I am not Marinetti), among other things, was commissioned specifically for the festival as part of Futurist Life Redux. According to the Performa website,

Inspired by the lost Futurist film Vita Futurista (Futurist Life, 1916), Futurist Life Redux is a new film featuring contributions by an incredible group of contemporary film and video artists—Trisha Baga, chameckilerner, Martha Colburn, Ben Coonley, George Kuchar, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Shana Moulton, Shannon Plumb, Aida Ruilova, Matthew Silver and Shoval Zohar (The Future), and Michael Smith—re-imagining the eleven segments of the original Futurist Life for the twenty-first century.

Read the rest of this entry →

As technology integrates itself more and more seamlessly and persistently into our daily lives and rituals, how will data be visualized to us? And how will our children learn to absorb and comprehend the rate of change and speed of information in the post-information age? The Incheon Digital Arts Festival Invitational Exhibit, which closes this weekend, tackles these questions through exhibitions showcasing the intersection of avant-garde art and technology. The exhibit is part of the Incheon Global Art Fair and Festival, which riffs on the theme of  ”the future city” with three distinct categories: Inter-Time, Inter-Face, and Inter-Space. INDAF 2009 General Director Unzi Kim states,

INDAF aims to interpret our sensational and emotional reaction to the media environment through reproducing artistic codecs within the sphere of art… Each day, the future comes from the continuities of the present. In this exhibition, a happy, thus delightful future, and beautiful life will be presented to you.

Appropriately, Global Mind Radar/Reader (An Emotional Barometer), 2008 created by Lynn and shown previously in 01SJ A Global Festival of Art of the Edge as part of Life to the Power of n was included as part of  Inter-Face.

The face of Global Mind Radar/Reader (An Emotional Barometer)

Read the rest of this entry →

In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto, ushering in an interdisciplinary, revolutionary art movement that spanned painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, film, and music. A century later, Lynn has created Customized Marinetti, a new video debuting in the Futurist Film Festival at Performa 09 this November.

Performa is a performance-centered biennial which acts, like Portland, Oregon’s annual Time Based Art Festival, as a state-of-the-union laboratory for the many iterations of performance. Transforming the city through the collaboration of a multitude of curators, institutions, mediums, and disciplines, this year’s Performa uses Futurism as a jumping-off point, which according to the event’s website,

will re-imagine the past, with historical reconstructions such as the legendary “Intonarumori” and also look to the future, with its focus on new media and the infinite possibilities of generating new directions for the visual and performing arts of the new century, as imagined by today’s artists.

Lynn certainly has no hesitation when it comes to re-imagining the past. From reframing past performances and installations to creating and recording narratives of historical figures, her process is akin to a gathering trajectory, where past fuels present and future with a speed and boldness that would make any Futurist proud. As she quotes, “Time has a way of revising truth, particularly when one has unlimited perceptions of an experience.”

The schedule for the Futurist Film Festival is not yet available, but check back for updates- New Yorkers and those who will be in New York in November, don’t miss it!

Read the rest of this entry →

Iterations, original and virtual, of the Dante Hotel

While we here on Pacific Standard Time have not even finished our first pot of coffee, amazing things are happening on the other side of the world (and, in other worlds)! For example, part of ISEA2009: The Exhibition has opened at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast. Simultaneously, the works featured in this exhibition are viewable from around the globe on Kriti Island (not the one in Greece, the one in Second Life). This synchronicity creates a space to explore both the physical and virtual gallery environments, where viewers and visitors can encounter the work, and also each other, as both bodies and avatars. The Dante Hotel Regenerated is one of the works installed on Kriti Island and at Golden Thread, as part of Kritical Spaces: The Kritical Works in SL II Project. ISEA2009: the Exhibition is presented in conjunction with the ISEA2009 Symposium, and

addresses contested spaces, focusing on the environment, political and economic conflicts and the human body. Curated by Kathy Rae Huffman, it will display an exciting range of innovative and challenging work at the interface of art, science, communication and technology.

Read the rest of this entry →

If you are looking for regular doses of snarkiness, it’s hard to beat ArtForum. Here they are talking about Manchester, England:

I was pleasantly surprised to find Manchester in its characteristically dismal shade, stuck in that half-rain state that suits a city of bummed cigarettes, franchise sandwich shops, and red-tag sales at Primark.

And why did Artfoum have to be in dismal Manchester? Why to see Lynn of course. And, noting the sunglasses, you can see that Lynn brought over some of her California sunshine.

Motorato Ware, Lynn’s lead virtuality architect in Second Life, has completed the curation of The Dante Hotel Regenerated, which re-documents the Life Squared project undertaken by Lynn in conjunction with the Stanford Humanities Lab. This new exhibit, located on Kriti Island in Second Life, has been created for Kritical Works in SL II at ISEA2009: The 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art, which will take place from August 23-September 1, 2009 in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Avatar at work: curating the Regenerated Dante

Read the rest of this entry →

An exhibition employee examines the interactive video installation America's Finest.

Now on display at Bilderschlachten (Image Battles) at Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche in Osnabrueck, Germany, America’s Finest (1993-5) utilizes an M-16 rifle and manipulated optics to question the identity of agressor and victim and the role played by images of war in the psyche of the observer.

Read the rest of this entry →