the livingblog

This evening, March 2, join us at Intersection for the Arts for “Clips and Conversation”, part of their Open Process series and an unprecedented opportunity presented by Bay Area Women in Film and Media! Not only will participants get a sneak peek of clips from TWO forthcoming documentaries about feminist art- Lynn’s !Women Art Revolution: a (formerly!) secret history, and Joan Braderman’s The Heretics- but they’ll also participate in a post-screening forum with Lynn, The Heretics producer Crescent Diamond,  BAWIFM President Simone Nelson, and other exciting academic and artistic voices. Considering !WAR won’t be released until Fall 2010, this will truly be an evening to remember and a chance to get in on the ground floor of the dialogue this project will generate across the art world. Here at the livingblog, we hope to collect and disseminate this dialogue as much as we can. In the meantime, take yourself here for more details.  Of course, for BAWIFM members, the event is free.

In an era of digital and biological sampling, life – especially artificial intelligence based life is self replicating and autonomous, and utilizes sophisticated apparatus to proclaim the erasure the death itself.

So reads an excerpt from Lynn’s essay “Evolutionary Suicide”, commissioned for the current, ongoing Guggenheim Forum, Beyond Material Worth. The essay, along with the writings of other respected intellectuals from a wide range of fields, will be included in the “Declarations” portion of the Forum, concerning the notion of progress and how it applies to their investigations and bodies of work.

Agent Ruby (2002-), an artifical intelligence agent with the capacity to develop her memory and knowledge base by interacting with users.

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As you may or may not have noticed, there have been a few changes to the digital face of the livingblog lately. In anticipation (and celebration!) of Lynn’s new documentary project, !Women Art Revolution: a (formerly!) secret history, we’ve been doing some renovations!

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Microcinema International has announced its catalog of releases for 2010, which will offer not one, not two, but THREE ways to get your paws on a piece of Lynn’s cinematic oeuvre!

Lynn Hershman Leeson in stills from Binge (l), and First Person Plural (r), both from The Electronic Diaries Series

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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.

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Since the late 1960s, Lynn Hershman Lesson has remained new media’s pioneer woman, creating the first site-specific installation and the first robotic net works with a humanoid presence, integrating performance, theater, photography, and interactivity in entirely new modes, breaking ground in this life as well as Second Life, and making powerful films that push the boundaries of experimental documentary and narrative structure. This video, “30 Years in 30 Seconds”, should give you some idea (albeit crunched down) of her trajectory.

We recently announced via the livingblog that the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Technology (ACM SIGGRAPH) is awarding Lynn the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art.  We failed to mention that this is the very first time that this award has been given out, making Lynn and her colleague Roman Verostko the inaugural recipients of this incredibly distinctive honor! And what a deserved honor it is for an artist that, in a culture that is so bent on constant renewal, reinvention, and rediscovery, has stayed so relevant, so ingenuous, so versatile, and so forward-thinking.

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Lynn's Project Page at Creative Capital

Last weekend? England. This weekend? Massachusetts. Lynn is away at Williams College for a retreat hosted by those innovative, philanthropic funders of contemporary art, Creative Capital. Founded by Ruby Lerner, who is now president, the organization is now celebrating its tenth anniversary! Oh, and they awarded Lynn a grant in 2008, for Women Art Revolution.

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New Years 2008 in New Orleans

Now in its 36th year, the SIGGRAPH conference is the premier international event on computer graphics and interactive techniques. SIGGRAPH 2009 is expected to draw an estimated 25,000 professionals from five continents to New Orleans, Louisiana.

In other words, if you are a true geek, SIGGRAPH is big – really big. Computer graphics are the cutting edge of computer technology and SIGGRAPH is the showcase of the latest and the best in graphics.

Well, can you guess who is going to be on the main stage to receive the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital? Yup, the Computer Graphics Society confirms that Lynn is this years winner!

Bravo Lynn! No need to worry about geeks bearing gifts this time.

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.