Enjoy!

Lynn with Whitworth Gallery Director Maria Balshaw (And Roberta)

Lynn with Roberta: Graph to Early Signs of Stress #7 (1978)

Dr. Alison Rowley of Liverpool John Moores University at Lynn's Touched Talk. Lynn showed a rough cut of !WAR

Roberta's Multiples

While Eyjafjallajokull has been belching fire and smoke across the European continent, stopping planes in their tracks, Lynn has necessarily had to make some changes to her agenda. Both of her upcoming events in England have been rescheduled to accommodate the angry volcano. Here are the details:

First, her “Touched Talk”, which was scheduled for today as part of the ramp-up to the Liverpool Biennial, has been moved to May 12. If you haven’t bought tickets yet, they aren’t available on the “Touched Talk” website at this moment, but we’ll make sure to let you know if they’ve sold out and when any remaining tickets are available! This will be an unprecedented chance to see !Women Art Revolution! a (formerly) secret history, in progress.

Next up: “The Complete Roberta Breitmore Symposium”, which was previously scheduled for April 24 at the  University of Manchester Whitworth Art Gallery, will now occur on May 15. This is the exhibition tour and panel discussion featuring Lynn, Jackie Stacey, and Maria Balshaw, and it is FREE. Again, space is at a premium, so if you’d like to attend, contact the gallery immediately. No really, this second. Email events.whitworth@manchester.ac.uk or call 0161 275 7450.

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.

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.

With a missive like that, it’s unsurprising that  you will be able to find Roberta Breitmore, in some of her many iterations, alongside works by other Bay Area talents. This past fall, An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself showcased works by Annie Liebowitz, Catherine Opie, and Katy Grannan. The opening of Part 2 runs from 5-8 PM tonight.

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.

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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