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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Original Receipt from the Dante Hotel (1973-4)

This Saturday the 14 of November, the School of Visual Arts in New York City is hosting Media Modes, a graduate student conference dedicated to emerging theorists and their scholarship on art and technology. Of course, no event of this kind would be complete without addressing Lynn’s oeuvre, especially one including a session entitled “Body, Identity, and the Virtual Space”! This session is one of two (the other being “Spatial Experience and Social Networking”) which kick off the day, and presenting on Lynn’s work is up-and-coming critical writer and curator Jaime Austin. A 2008 graduate of California College of Art’s School of Curatorial Practice, Austin will act as an assistant curator for the 2010 01SJ Biennial, where Lynn has also, in the past, exhibited innovative work in new media. Her paper is entitled “Space, Identity, and Embodiment—On Lynn Hershman Leeson’s The Dante Hotel and Life Squared”. She is the only presenter from a West-Coast school in attendance, although other presenters hail from prestigious programs on both a national and international scale.

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Iterations, original and virtual, of the Dante Hotel

While we here on Pacific Standard Time have not even finished our first pot of coffee, amazing things are happening on the other side of the world (and, in other worlds)! For example, part of ISEA2009: The Exhibition has opened at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast. Simultaneously, the works featured in this exhibition are viewable from around the globe on Kriti Island (not the one in Greece, the one in Second Life). This synchronicity creates a space to explore both the physical and virtual gallery environments, where viewers and visitors can encounter the work, and also each other, as both bodies and avatars. The Dante Hotel Regenerated is one of the works installed on Kriti Island and at Golden Thread, as part of Kritical Spaces: The Kritical Works in SL II Project. ISEA2009: the Exhibition is presented in conjunction with the ISEA2009 Symposium, and

addresses contested spaces, focusing on the environment, political and economic conflicts and the human body. Curated by Kathy Rae Huffman, it will display an exciting range of innovative and challenging work at the interface of art, science, communication and technology.

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Motorato Ware, Lynn’s lead virtuality architect in Second Life, has completed the curation of The Dante Hotel Regenerated, which re-documents the Life Squared project undertaken by Lynn in conjunction with the Stanford Humanities Lab. This new exhibit, located on Kriti Island in Second Life, has been created for Kritical Works in SL II at ISEA2009: The 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art, which will take place from August 23-September 1, 2009 in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Avatar at work: curating the Regenerated Dante

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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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