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

Tilda Swinton in stills from Conceiving Ada (l), and Teknolust (r)

Along with a program of Lynn’s groundbreaking experimental videos, re-releases of Conceiving Ada (1997) and Teknolust (2002), will also be available for purchase through Microcinema International’s online store. As Microcinema International’s newsletter has quoted,

For almost fifty years, Lynn Hershman Leeson has created work that has challenged and inspired audiences.

What better way to whet your appetite for !Women Art Revolution, Lynn’s new and highly anticipated documentary, then by taking a journey through her projects past?

But, as the web site points out:

“The exhibition title Reflections on the Electric Mirror is taken from an eponymous essay written in the 1970s by artist/filmmaker Lynn Hershman that examines the link between television and video art. The mirror serves as an apt metaphor for work in which artists use their own images for various types of subjectivity and self-analysis, ranging from role playing to autobiography.”

That means that this post itself is but a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, which begs the question, “who is the fairest of them all?” Well, don’t ask us. We are just bottom feeders here.

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.

Fair enough, but Dorothy was talking about real wine in a real bottle. Now suppose we were talking about virtual labels on virtual bottles. Well then your frontal lobe would also have to be virtual wouldn’t it?

Now look at the image above. It’s Roberta Breitmore in Second Life, isn’t it? She doesn’t really exist. Neither does the wine in the bottle on the right. The bottle’s empty. And therefore so is your brain.

We’re not making this up. Imagery Estate Winery was founded by Joe Benziger of Benziger Family Winery, with the intent of showcasing varietals and regions that don’t get enough attention. Each label features unique artwork from a worldwide array of artists. The 2008 vintage features a label designed by Lynn Hershman. It’s all quite real. May we suggest that you, ASAP, get a bottle in front of you…

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?

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.