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In June 2007 Lynn Hershman and I met in Manhattan for a discussion about the project Life Squared, our collaboration in the online world Second Life around the regeneration of the archive of her installation of 1972 at the Dante Hotel, San Francisco. Here is a transcript that appeared in Seed Magazine in October 2007.

We talked about our shared archaeological sensibility, the politics of presence in our contemporary cultural condition ...

Seed Salon, Issue 12 - [link]

Lynn Hershman & Michael Shanks

Michael Shanks: Nineteen seventy-two: you were working in San Francisco, and you produced a work at the Dante Hotel.

Lynn Hershman: Yes. I’d done a piece with sound at the museum, which they closed down because, they said, media wasn’t art and didn’t belong in an art museum. So it occurred to me that it would be more efficient to use an environment, as it already existed, like a ready made.

So, Eleanor Coppola and I created rooms in the Dante Hotel, which was a run-down place in North Beach. it was very simple. WE rented the rooms—mine was rented indefinitely; hers was rented for, two weeks.

I created a situation where people could look at presumed identities within the room constructed from artifacts placed in the room.

MS: So, you put stuff in there?

LH: Yes. I brought in some goldfish; there was a soliloquy of Molly Bloom. There were books that the presumed people might have read, clothing that they might have worn. People were invited to trespass. It was open 24 hours a day; people could check in at the front desk, get the key, and go through it, stay as long as they wanted, and displace it.

MS: Did anybody, the visitors, the trespassers, leave anything behind?

LH: Nobody left anything. They graffitied the mirror that was there, but nobody took anything. They really respected that space.

MS: And you were monitoring people coming and going?

LH: No, not really. It was left gathering dust and the flux of time as people traveled through that space. I was just realizing that time and space were elements of sculpture.

MS: And then the police came at some point, didn’t they?

LH: Yeah—ha! Somebody reported a body in the bed, because there were these wax cast figures that they misread in the middle of the night.

MS: But they’d been there from the beginning?

LH: Yes. And the police confiscated everything in the room and took all the artifacts down to central headquarters, which, I thought, was really the apt ending to that particular narrative.

MS: And then 32 years later, Stanford acquired your archive of ninety-something boxes. The remains of your body of work, what hadn’t been taken away by the police, I guess!

LH: Yes.

MS: As an archaeologist, I’m interested in what comes after the event, as it were. What you do with the remains of the past, sometimes to somehow try to get back to where they originated.

LH: I don’t know that you can ever get back, but you can go forward using it as the context of the future. The trail and the remains may be dormant but they exist waiting to be revived or resuscitated or resurrected into something else.

MS: Yes, regenerated. This is one of our major points of contact. A lot of people think that archaeology—archaeologists—discover the past. And that’s only a little bit true. I think it’s more accurate to say that they work on what remains. That may sometimes involve, absolutely, coming across stuff from the past—as my colleague Henry Lowood and I did with your boxes in the Stanford collection—but the key thing about archaeology is that it works on what’s left. And that makes of all of us, really, a kind of archaeologist. We’re all archaeologists now, working on what remains of the past.

And you’re right, as we explore this stuff, we figure out how to take it forward.

LH: I didn’t want the work to remain in boxes. Much as I love the Stanford Library and Special Collections, I wanted this to be more universally accessible. I suggested to Henry Lowood that, possibly, we could make a game, a mystery or a film noir about the remains of this evidence of a life, which portrayed itself in various episodes. Henry suggested a possible adaptation Second Life, part of Stanford Humanities lab's interest in interactive and participatory media — hence our project "life squared".

MS: Which is, of course, how you became involved in the Presence Project.

LH: Yes.

MS: And it connects with the interest that we share in the nature of the archive. Boxes, in a collection, vitrines in a museum, they’re often—and appropriately—seen as quite static.

LH: That’s right. Static but charged.

MS: Unless there’s a reason to reuse stuff, it’ll fall out of use or be stored away; and, eventually, it’ll end up in a landfill site, if you’re lucky. Or destroyed. So the question we share is how to re-animate the archive.

LH: Exactly. Revitalize the past, inserting it into the present, which gives direction to its future.

MS: Yes. Displacement is another key feature of this archaeological sensibility - what happens when old stuff, remains, are shifted into new associations.

LH: And, it’s particularly interesting because Second Life and some of these social-network programs involve notions of trespass that have no geographic boundaries. So it’s taking the exact same premise of this project, the Dante Hotel from 30 years earlier and transplanting it into something that allows a completely different but, yet, related, experience.

MS: Yes. Of course, I love the broad archaeological components of this.

Part of our particular contemporary attitude towards spaces, and places is archaeological and concerns evidence. It’s about how we almost automatically and subconsciously look at spaces in terms of evidence. It’s a forensic sensibility.

Let me explain.

Archaeologists survey and excavate places. they document, map, collect and categorize with rigor and scrutiny. This was the significance of its fieldwork in the history of science, even before it was called archaeology.

Like the other human sciences, archaeology came to involve the collection of evidence and work with such evidence (categorization and analysis), seeking to identify what generated the remains —for example, past events, social or environmental changes. Archaeological evidence is thus treated as symptomatic traces of deep structures or events. Archaeology has come to be such a hybrid science of material traces.

The detective, another invention of the nineteenth century, also looks for traces that could help piece together a sequence of events. Both archaeologist and detective connect evidence with event and place.

But how do you know what might be the key evidence at a scene of crime or on an archaeological site? Anything might be relevant. Anywhere could be such a scene of crime. This is what I mean by a forensic sensibility — a suspicious attitude towards places, where anything could be the trace of something, maybe dark and hidden, that once happened there.

LH: But, now, with the forensic sensibility, there’s also a digital demeanor that didn’t exist before.

MS: Oh, right. “Digital demeanor,” I like that.

LH: A digital demeanor of trespass using interaction to reveal the forensics and evidence and potential reconversion of one use into another.

MS: Yeah, which brings up implications for storage, for retrieval, and, of course, surveillance, and looking, watching, and how these have become incorporated in all sorts of digital technologies.

For two centuries and more, archaeologists have been developing a toolkit for working upon the traces of the past. And this is not just a toolkit for constructing history in the sense of an account of what happened. Archaeologists deal in the lost, decayed, transformed traces of the past that remain in the present. So archaeologists are more concerned with a kind of genealogy — how the past, in its traces, has come down to the present, rather than the traditional sense of history as what happened in the past.

LH: This can involve the trauma of memory.

MS: Oh, yes. This is absolutely archaeological. We often feel separate from the past, and then, in that separation, we visit a room, such as the Dante, and we instinctively look to piece together what we see in front of us.

Archaeological science does not discover the past. It works on what remains.

LH: But, in this particular case of our project life squared, you’re able to see the evidence being looked at and to lurk inside and watch somebody else discovering the evidence and recreate endless narratives, you know, and re-pattern what the same information is and create yet another trail of how it’s being seen, re-seen, recomposed, remixed, so that you have infinite number of ways to perceive it.

MS: And, I think, our digital demeanor, as you put it, precisely foregrounds us again. I mean I could argue that it’s always been a component of what we do: taking up bits of the past, reusing them, reworking them, either in terms of memory—the memory traces that we retell again as a new story—or, in this case, absolutely, with the digital realm, it’s so much easier to remix, to rework, because of all the facility of software and indeed spaces, places, like Second Life.

LH: And erasure of ownership.

MS: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I’m very keen on countering this notion that, in terms of the past, we need to somehow hang on to it and preserve it.

LH: How do you preserve it? How do you embalm it? How do you embalm time?

MS: Well, yes indeed. In this way, to preserve the past is to kill it off. Transformation, translation is essential if the past is to live. As you say, a creative and iterative component, revisiting and reworking the past, challenges a static past and keeps it present, therefore alive.

LH: How?

MS: Just yesterday, I got an email announcing a website of Virtual Reality reconstructions of ancient sites — 3D computer models of the forum at Rome, an ancient basilica, an ancient monument in Greece.

This company has just won a Google Award to fund their operation and to share these 3D reconstructions. And it’s part ... it is supposed to be part of Google’s democratization of information.

These are CAD architectural models visualized in something like the application 3D Studio, so you can walk through them, for example. They are 'realistic' in the sense that you can admire the textures, experience the spaces and watch the light coming in through the window.

IT IS meant to be a very engaging experience of the past, history reconstructed in some kind of photographic verisimilitude - present to you now. Because that’s what we’re talking around here, the presence of the past.

I find such reconstructions utterly empty and dead.

You know, to walk through a room that you haven’t seen before, in some kind of photographic verisimilitude on a computer screen, doesn’t necessarily elicit any reaction other than a distracting and superficial one such as, “Ooh, the texture of the floor is spot on.” “Ooh, I like the light coming in through that window; it’s just right.” “Ooh, yeah, the marble on that wall there is spot on, too.”

Research into the effectiveness of such VR reconstructions consistently reveals that what generates a sense of being there is not this kind of surface authenticity, but the fidelity of narrative. and the narrative of such graphics is a simple one of perambulation. Stories live. You can only admire the lurid colors of decay of a past pickled in a jar.

Yes, these VR models can be very flashy, highly naturalistic and look "real". But like photography, they tell mostly about superficial details that don’t matter in our attempts to make sense and understand. What about the things that are going on underneath, the unseen that produced the remains of the past that we work on? A lot of data, about floor plans, the shape of ashlar blocks, the play of light upon marble, the refraction of light through a window opening gives little understanding about life in the past. This is the old illusion — that a faithfulness to the external appearance of things gives us a hold on reality.

And such models forget about engagement. Not just the experience of visiting old places, but the detective work that turns data into information and then into stories that engage people now.

I sometimes think that these elaborate VR models of the past are part of a contemporary optimism that a quantitative increase in data will somehow deliver a better understanding of the world. In this kind of digital archaeology I see the dream that eventually and with so much data at hand we will be able to relive the past. This is the impossible desire to bring back the dead. I say instead — look! — the past is over and done, decayed, ruined, lost. We only have a few bits to work on. And this is what is fascinating.

VR archaeology is a project that brings to mind that in the movie "The Matrix" — the creation of a world that actually doesn’t or didn’t exist, though it is lived as reality.

LH: The closer you get to what you think something is, the more evident it is that it is also an illusion .

MS: Beautiful. Yes. Absolutely — This is the complementarity of data — as evidence — and the constitutive imagination — the work we do on the evidence. It's a question of what truly constitutes evidence about who you are, about who I am.

LH: It’s always apparent in the flaws. You know, it’s in the crack in the wall, not the replication of it. I mean, that’s where the truth is, it seems to hide waiting to be discovered. And often it is completely obvious and in the open trying to morph into one’s attention.

MS: Yeah. It’s in the gaps, in the dust, it’s the stuff that gets overlooked. The noise, as Michel Serres would have it.

So, anyway, that issue of authenticity, I think, is a big one. Considerable resources, research dollars and institutional support are being devoted to this kind of VR modeling. Just try a few Google searches!

And you know, it’s...

LH: It’s wrong.

MS: Well, it's illusory in The Matrix sense. There’s an authenticity there, because all of the stuff that’s left over is on show. In high-res detail, you can zoom in on it and look at it in considerable detail. But by no means is it simply “The Past.”.

So it is an interesting negotiation between our current means and the ends we may have in mind for archeology. How we document the past connects, obviously, with all sorts of technologies and instruments now. Instrumentalities relating to information, information flow, information organization. The whole field of documentation of ourselves, is changing as our tools change.

LH: The information age requires unprecedented tools and we’ve invented them.

I’m making a piece right now that also deals with the five leading blog tags in the world, where you can just see what people are thinking about. It’s a global mind-reader, of sorts. there are images of a woman who responds to incoming blogs and quantify it using special software that reads key words and tags and makes judgments about the emotional range of information.

I’m adapting Lexalytics and Teknorati software, or my programmer Colin Klingman is, so that this little device lets us know at a glance the mood of the global mind as seen in constantly evolving and morphing blogs.

So many things that used to hidden are now evidenced and present. I love revealing code, that’s the backbone of technology, but we need to invert the exo-skeleton.

There are some wonderful ways to photograph and scan, for instance, paintings to uncover their histories; To see their scars beneath the layers.

I like to pull forward the things that we’ve always thought should be invisible and make that a part of the communication structure, in fact, the whole nature of a work.

The invisible becomes part of it, the code becomes part of it, the re-patterning of information becomes the aesthetic itself.

MS: I love this, again, A whole series of archaeological metaphors — uncovering layers, digging deep to gain insight, scrutinizing apparently inconsequential surface traces — clues to help reveal what is invisible and connected to the past.

LH: By revealing process, we also reveal meaning. What is the rationale for our tradition of covering and concealing?

MS: Protection, surely. So much of the global obsession with historical heritage is about staking property claims — "this is my past". A lot of it’s about property rights and retaining ownership over knowledge of the past by not revealing process.

LH: Or hiding what’s considered a flaw, or a scar. And concealing is, one only can assume, a value judgment of that particular time. We're living in a time of surveillance. And the revelation creates a completely different, and broader, context, and isn’t limited by geography, for instance, but access.

MS: Yes, and as you know, I’ve a deep interest in the history of these attitudes, the history of these archaeological approaches to the world, to evidence, to information, to documentation. And it’s undoubtedly the case that we see a lot of this coming together, particularly the uncovering. The interest in ruination, the interest in decay, the Gothic interest in the dark side of things, is very much an 18th century invention, or preoccupation at least.

It’s the figure of the undead, of the renegade, the perverse count in some ramshackle castle, you know, who’s influencing the present, coming back to haunt us.

LH: Was the creation of the undead simultaneous with the invention of electricity?

MS: Well, certainly it all goes together. There was a barrage in the Age of Reason, the development of experimental methods, of science, of rationality. And this accompanied, of course, a romantic fascination with the other side of reason. The irrational. Whether it’s mental or social or cultural. The invention of modern notions of crime comes at this same time. So, deviation, crime, all goes with this hyper-rationalized approach to nature and the world, or at least the extension of rationality as a universal principle.

It was about separating the rational from the irrational.

LH: And deciding which is which.

MS: Yes, and trying to decide between the two, which is connected to another component: the demarcation of what it is to be human.What is human and what isn’t human.

So, it’s the machine and the human, or the inhuman and the human. Or the stuff that is often seen as accoutrement to us, separate to us, whether it’s the information that we generate about ourselves, or our stuff, our material things.

Questions: Is it me? Is it not me? Is this information who I am? Is this trail I leave in the world around me, this archeological trace, is it me or is it something secondary? The things I use and own, do they constitute who I am? Or are they just the things that I use?

Where do I end and where does the world begin and how am I, as a person, dispersed in the socio-cultural world? This is a classic theme that has worried us—in its modern guise—since the 18th century.

And it goes with the invention of disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology and human and social sciences.

LH: But now we’re spawning a different kind of mutation, because we’re able to reconceive ourselves and almost virally and instantly put that morphed and evolving regeneration into the world specifically so that it can be adapted and changed. So, where does that mutation leave us? Is our sense of presence an appendage to how we are perceived?

MS: As an archaeologist, I can look at the long term, and that’s what I always say archaeologists have to make them distinct. We’ve got a long-term view of things.

Absolutely, we’re made very conscious of this now. It’s because of, I think, access to tools, worlds of digital tools for dealing with who we are. We can see all this happening, but I still consider these processes to be about where we are and who we are, how we display information about ourselves. And how the material goods that we work with make us what we are.

I see all of this, really, as just coming at the end of a long, long history. I don’t think it’s new. I think these issues have faced us for as long as we’ve been human. The phrase that I use is that, for as long as we’ve human, we’ve been cyborgs. We’ve been intimately connected with things, with goods.

In the early days, they weren’t machines of course. In the earliest days—and I’m going back to 120,000 years ago—I think what made us human was an intimacy with goods, with things, in a kind of machinic assemblage, even though they weren’t formal machines or mechanisms.

Social order, technology and things are inseparable. If you define a machine as an interlocking system of resistant parts that performs work, then the first machines were networks of association involving human bodies and cultural goods. This takes us back those 120,000 years to the first modern humans. By 5000 years ago the temple and imperial administrative bureaucracies of the ancient Near East were what Lewis Mumford called megamachines. Organizations of people involving systems of division of labor and logistics, they built the pyramids — 20,000 horsepower running for perhaps 600 years and capable of positioning a million stone blocks accurate to a fraction of an inch.

Society — a machinic assemblage.

LH: Can autonomous agents even exist, do you think? Or do you think that everything is kind of tempered by the clonage, by the sampling, by the remixing? How would you determine whether something is independent, isolated? It can’t be, in order to function.

MS: Yeah, yeah. Distributed phenomena - cultural ecologies.

I have been fascinated by the way your work explores the limits of what makes someone an authentic self. As an anthropologist, I agree that such authenticity is not best connected solely to internal properties of an autonomous individual. We find our authentic selves in others and in our relations with goods.

Our work together — Life Squared — is a remix of your work in 1972, now, in the online world Second Life.

We might ask the question — is it an authentic document of the original work at the Dante Hotel?

In response to such a question we have deliberately avoided what I call the fallacy of representation — that we should somehow present an illusion of the room in the Dante Hotel - "the way it was", in photographic verisimilitude.

LH: And what would be an authentic document anyway? What would be documented?

MS: Think of what’s happening in this room right now? That is, in the future, looking back to now, what would the definitive statement, representation, of the room here and now?

There’s a conversation happening between you and me, but even that is influenced by where I’ve come from, where you’ve come from, and it will take us in different directions in the future. And I don’t know, maybe in a little bit of time I’ll look back on this and say, "Ah, that was when I realized my calling was not archaeology but the arts!"

So, what happened in this room was—yes, a conversation—but that was coincidental to something else that I realized, only with hindsight, had happened.

But then you might say, what’s happening in this room is that the air conditioning has been switched off and the patterns of heat transfer are now apparent. As a physicist, you have a very different view of things.

As an investor, perhaps your perspective is that this is the last use of the building before they redevelop it and turn it into condominiums.

So, what’s going here has no bottom line. There’s no definitive answer to say, this is what’s going on here, and it can therefore be represented in one way.

So, how do you make a video of all of that? How do you make photographs of all of that? How do you document all that? That is the classic issue, I think, about what you’re raising, about what is the definitive record or representation of something, an event, an occurrence, a person.

There isn’t one. Now, such a realization is not disempowering; it’s the opposite. It is empowering, because it opens the door creative regeneration; to remix, to rework, to work upon processes of documentation, of engagement, whatever.

LH: And invisibility. Things we can’t see now, that are embedded in time waiting to reveal themselves. And there are many ghosts lurking unseen and it will take generations of inventive technology to understand that our perceptions are limited to the technologies we can access.

MS: Wonderful. I love, again, all the archaeology in that thought — the remains, the stains and the flaws that make time what it is ...

LH: Let's throw in bodily fluids too ...

MS: It’s the materiality of things.

LH: Absolutely!

MS: Which for an archaeologist, is just uppermost, precisely in what we do. It’s archaeology, what you’re also referring to.

It’s research into those things, the invisible. And absolutely, here what we have is a continuity from notions of the hidden, the invisible, the mysterious, through to the rational, detailed, scientific research that can be done to uncover what we want to work with and what we want to discard.

It’s sifting through stuff to find materials that we can creatively take up, either in the arts or in archaeological sciences. In the arts to deal with the sorts of ideas that are sort of prevalent in your work about who we are, where we’ve come from and what our extensions are into the world and what our personalities are.

And from my point of view, in archeology, it’s about archival practices and how we retain genuine pasts, which nevertheless have the fascination of fantasy, because they live with us now. They’re regenerated, revitalized in an appropriate way.

LH: But you really can’t discard anything. It’s impossible. I mean, just like not being able to see the struggles in full, glorious, 3D, virtual renditions. It’s only a matter of time to see what economies determine to be sustainable. It is going to be surprising, not at all what we expect, not at all linear.

MS: I think what you’re looking for here, I think very appropriately, is what I would call the politics of legacy.

LH: Of presence.

MS: Yes—the politics of presence. What is made present and what is kept absent and invisible.

LH: But it’s never completely invisible, because it can always be traced.

MS: Well, there, again, in my long-term perspective—it’s a very melancholic one—I think that most of history is ... well, we’ve just lost it all.

LH: Ahh. Yes, you are correct.

MS: And I think there is a crucial issue in our current politics, now and for the future, which is what are we able to recall, to document, to trace, and what should be documented and traced and not kept invisible.

LH: And who makes those decisions.

MS: Absolutely, it’s about power over these processes. It’s a crucial issue.

At the same time, as I say, there is a melancholy about our pasts in that so much has been deliberately destroyed or concealed or forgotten. It’s the politics of the past. As we all know, it’s the winners who write the history books.

But I think, with this digital moment, this digital demeanor—and behind it lies the utopianism of a lot of digital culture—the tools to uncover are in our hands. Ours and those of people who haven’t had access to this kind of cultural tool before.

LH: Our memories may be gone, but they’re certainly recorded now in a way that was not possible before. They are downloaded and retrievable. What will be preserved and archived will depend on the priorities, cleverness, politics and rebelliousness of each generation.

MS: Right, you are talking about the will to conserve. It’s a task to conserve, to rework, precisely in the way that we took that box of stuff connected to 1972 and reworked it in 2006, 2007. That’s the only way the past is going to keep going. It has to be taken up and reworked. So, in the proliferation, the digital proliferation of all this stuff, from the mundane, the quotidian, the everyday of people’s lives, if that’s going to survive to give a new angle on the present — our present, here, now — if that’s going to be the basis for a new kind of understanding of the everyday history of the digital 21st century, the only way that’s going to happen is if people take it up in terms of those energies you’ve just described.

They’ve got to want to do it; they’ve got to rework it. To just have it sit there, we know nothing’s going to happen. What’s going to happen to your floppy disks from a few years ago if you don’t put them onto CDS, DVDS, if you don’t migrate the media, if you don’t conserve, literally work on things. Material preservation won’t work. Information is a verb. You have to take things up and rework them, remix them.

LH: To make them alive.

MS: To make them live again. It’s reincarnation, literally. You incarnate. You give them new material forms that you engage with.

LH: Sometimes I think there are things that refuse to die or to be static. Like an idea, they can be extremely live and potent. Or a discarded relic that links to a chain of collective memory. Patterns of thinking form an encryption system that we do not yet understand yet but nevertheless is connective.

MS: I think that’s provocative. If they’re connected enough with sort of energies, people’s energies, to actually take them up and use them. Yeah. But that’s the only way. Otherwise, I think what we’ll see is today as being a kind of digital dark age.

There is all this stuff, not inappropriately everyday and ephemeral. Not much of the ephemeral is going to be taken up and reworked and remixed perhaps. But I think the great prospect is that some unexpected components of today are going to be taken up and remixed and reworked.

Not the great, grand stories of history, not the great accounts proffered by the victors and the great, powerful figures of today. No — I think there is the potential for some of the mundane, the everyday, the stuff that really makes life what it is today being taken up and reworked and remixed. That would be fascinating.

And, actually, this is what archaeological science has always offered — accounts of everyday life with which we can all identify and yet find uncanny. It may simply be a thumbprint upon an ancient pot that connects an inconsequential past moment with the present; it may be the evidence of the lives of those who built somewhere like Stonehenge. It is the archaeological focus upon the everyday that many people find fascinating. An archaeological imagination we all share.

LH: Such optimism is a terrific weapon for the future.