Avatar at work: curating the Regenerated Dante

From the many works in the Hershman archive at Stanford University, the Life Squared project selected The Dante Hotel for its inherent resistance to traditional, paper-based approaches to conservation and documentation. Life Squared not only endows this time-based experimental piece with a second life, rendering it viewable within the framework of a richly textured critical and contextual apparatus, but it also embeds the experience of the art work within that of its recent exhibition history.

Housing the project in Second Life, an existing online world with specific tools already in place, allowed the integration of converging media–mixed reality across multiple channels– through which users could participate in a deeper exploration, investigation and contemplation of both the nature of archives and the context for documentation of contemporary art.

The Life Squared project has been presented at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2007) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008) as a mixed-reality work that combines live images and online assets with artifacts, prints, and documents from the original installation at the Dante Hotel in San Francisco (1973-74).

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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