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.

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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.

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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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