!WAR IS GOING TO TORONTO!

The livingblog is bursting at its virtual seams with excitement! Pregnant for forty years, !Women Art Revolution’s journey has just begun. Be sure to follow the film on Twitter and Facebook as well as over here to get updates and news as it unfolds and access to allll kinds of content that we have in the works. And if you’ll be in Canada on September 12, come and witness the revolution!

The newest recipient of the d.velop digital art award!

When you read the statement by the [ddaa] jury, which this year included Kelli Dipple, curator for Intermedia art at the Tate Modern, Dr. Norbert Nobis, associate director of the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Stephen Kovats, artistic director, Transmediale, Berlin, Germany, Prof. Dr. Wulf Herzogenrath, director of the Kunsthalle Bremen, and Wolf Lieser, gallery owner and director of the Digital Art Museum in Berlin, you can see why this award is so well-deserved:

Lynn Hershman Leeson has been at the forefront of new media art since the 70s, developing fluency in digital technologies as they evolved. A pivotal artist in the context of feminist discourse and a pioneer in interactive, computer and net-based media arts, Hershman Leeson has worked prolifically in mixed-media, photography, performance, digital art, video, film and interactive media.

Over the last four decades, Hershman Leeson has drawn on the fields of visual art, film and popular culture, making use of digital tools and cinematic metaphors to mirror society’s shifting ideas on identity, memory and history, as mediated through technology. Using social contexts and media platforms to rigorously examine issues related to consumerism, privacy, surveillance and the process by which personal power emerges.

You can read the rest of the jury’s statement, which includes a fantastic breakdown of the trajectory of Lynn’s innovations, accomplishments, and accolades, at the  [ddaa] website. Congratulations, Lynn!

Roberta's Physical Stance

Roberta Breitmore may have been exorcised in 1978, but she abides, in both physical and virtual form. We here at the livingblog are ecstatic to announce two upcoming opportunities to further explore the worlds of Roberta Breitmore. The best part? Lynn herself will be present for both!

Roberta's Camouflage

Roberta's Interim Driver's License

The first takes place tomorrow, March 27, at SF Camerawork in San Francisco. As part of the exhibition “The Future Lasts Forever”, the gallery is premiering “24-Hour Roberta”, a brand new performance in real time featuring Lynn’s avatar Roberta Ware. From 12-5Pm PST, gallery visitors can actually drive the avatar as she travels through the virtual world of Second Life. Can’t be there? Fear not! That’s only five hours, and that means there are nineteen more to catch. You can follow Roberta Ware through her Second Life derive by searching for her avatar, or find her at the Dante Hotel (in Second Life, of course), beginning at 5pm PST and every two hours thereafter.

For those livingblog followers residing across the pond, the Whitworth Gallery at the University of Manchester will be hosting “The Complete Roberta Breitmore Symposium” on April 24.  Featuring Lynn, feminist cultural theorist Jackie Stacey, and Whitworth director Maria Balshaw, this event will be held in conjunction with the gallery’s ongoing exhibition “The Complete Roberta Breitmore”, recently purchased by the gallery in its final edition. It begins at 2PM with a tour of the exhibition led by Lynn, and continues from 3-5PM with the symposium. Amazingly, this event is free, and as such is bound to fill up quickly. Act now to reserve space! Email events.whitworth@manchester.ac.uk or call 0161 275 7450 to make sure you don’t miss out.

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!

An inspiring film about freedom of expression and the influence of the feminist art movement on American culture, this groundbreaking documentary film combines forty years of stunning interviews with archival footage and a searing Riot-Grrrl-steeped soundtrack to tell the story of feminism and art:

!Women Art Revolution elaborates the relationship of the Feminist Art Movement to the 1960s anti-war and civil rights movements and explains how historical events, such as the all-male protest exhibition against the invasion of Cambodia, sparked the first of many feminist actions against major cultural institutions. The film details major developments in women’s art of the 1970s, including the first feminist art education programs, political organizations and protests, alternative art spaces such as the A.I.R. Gallery and Franklin Furnace in New York and the Los Angeles Women’s Building, publications such as Chrysalis and Heresies, and landmark exhibitions, performances, and installations of public art that changed the entire direction of art.

We here at the livingblog are proud to announce the official launch of the !WAR home page, as well as a plethora of ways to connect to the film, which has an anticipated release date of Fall 2010. The top sidebar on the right side of this page can direct you on how to get involved, and in the meantime, here’s a clip to tide you over, featuring Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz discussing their collaboration In Mourning and In Rage, and Judy Chicago discussing the first feminist art class at Fresno State University in 1970:

Lynn was recently spotted at Tosca Cafe in North Beach, San Francisco, with legendary filmmaker, author, and artist John Waters. Along with legendary cartoonist Spain Rodriguez and Barbie Nation filmmaker Susan Stern, they were there celebrating the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s seventy-fifth birthday. For more details, read all about it in Catherine Bigelow’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle. And how was YOUR weekend?

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?

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.

Futurist Life Redux was programmed by film archivist Andrew Lampert from the Anthology Film Archives and Performa curator Lana Wilson and acts as a coda to the Anthology Film Archives’ special futurist film program, “The Polyexpressive Symphony”. Film had a very specific role in the Futurist movement, according to an artforum.com article from November 2:

Seeking to liberate film from those narrative set pieces still beholden to the theater, the Futurists clamored for a cinema indebted solely to its own visual and aesthetic qualities. Those qualities—violent jumps of time and space, flux and dynamic mobility, conflations of different senses in one aesthetic idiom—already reflected, even epitomized, profoundly Futurist imperatives. In theory, film constituted the “ideal” art with which the Futurists would slay the musty conventions of “passéiste” culture.

Between this commission and the Media Modes Conference where a recent MA presented her thesis on Lynn, mid-November was a cornucopia of Lynn’s work in New York City. But wait- there’s more! Now showing at PS 1 as of November 1, 100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009) features seven, that’s right, seven, images of Roberta Breitmore (1974-78), Which makes sense, because the exhibition represents ” influential moments in the past century of performance art history”. The exhibition is on view until April 2010, so you can’t use holiday chaos as an excuse not to see it. Make it a New Year’s resolution, if you must.