Part of the Presence Project. Funded by the Langlois Foundation
On an island in SecondLife, building has commenced, constructed of traces, of remains of a past ... of regenerated bodies ...
Life squared is an encounter with the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson ... in a mixed reality animated archive.
http://stanford.edu/~mshanks/galleries/Life-Squared/
Did you ever know who you were?
For over three decades, in performance, photography, installations, artificial intelligence agents, artifacts, web presences and in movies, Lynn Hershman's work has dealt with what it is to live in a world of mediated, surveilled, documented, translated, manipulated, transformed identities, corporealities, and presences. Ninety boxes of the remains of much of this work now lie in an archive in Stanford University - papers, photographs, tapes, movies, sound recordings. Their relationship, as documents, to Lynn's "body"of work is in question.
What is it to recollect? - in this world of mediated and multiple presences. And with the prospect of even greater (bio-info-technological) intervention in our sense of self? Will your clone know you? Will your downloaded memories convey the experience of what was?
Documenting the past, we propose,
is to actively reshape and rework what remains
(of the future).
Life Squared will be a place where anyone, in the guise of an avatar, may encounter such a prospect - of revisiting and reworking the past, through Lynn's work.
Who is doing this?
Lynn herself and a team of people interested in what becomes of what was, in how to document work that has no simple material manifestation (that may be conserved), interested in the nature of the digital archive, in building creative encounters with what remains of the cultural archive, in the memory book, the art museum of tomorrow.
A team of artists, performers, archivists, archaeologists, technologists.
A team of people also fascinated by a contemporary archaeological zeitgeist - fascinated by the remains of the past.
Fascinated by the character of our selves today.
What are the issues?
- Memory and document - memory practices and material archives, and how they revolve around characters and architectures, stories, scenarios and "game play".
- The significance of "new media" to senses of self (under this matter of memory and document) - our argument is that digital worlds, games, online chat rooms and forums like Second Life are not "virtual" worlds, but are precisely "life to the second power" - augmentations, mixed realities (as are memory practices), enriched encounters.
- Our regenerated characters are related to those fascinating creatures - avatars, doppelgangers, AI agents, puppets, dolls, ghosts, zombies, manikins, alter-egos, augmented doubled selves, cyborgs, (ro)bots, automata ... . Far from being secondary derivatives, they are the stuff from which we are made.
- More prosaically and technically, we are exploring a 3D interface for an archival encounter that challenges (perhaps) the metaphoric basis of current machine/user interfaces. For a couple of decades the human-computer interface has been commonly presented as a metaphor - a desktop, with documents, files, trash cans. We are building instead a mixed reality, and it is arguably not an interface with a machine at all, but an extension, an augmentation of experience, of self.
- This connects directly with another fundamental issue of our sense of self - so connected with memory and remains of the past. Life to the Second Power proposes that our sense of self is so clearly now distributed - by this we mean it is made of encounters with friends, family and others, of memories and remains, associations with things, events, experiences that hold no one or particular material form, but constitute, precisely, a mixed reality.
- And the memory palace that is Life Squared is itself already distributed across our machines in all sorts of different places - reconstituted in every encounter.
- Life as art/art as life. Overall we are exploring potential futures for the (art) museum that life is becoming.
Life Squared is part of "The Presence Project" - and is associated with Metamedia in Stanford Archaeology Center and Stanford Humanities Lab
[rss:http://metamedia.stanford.edu/LifeSquared/index.xml]
Follow the project in our blog - http://metamedia.stanford.edu/LifeSquared
Main gallery of project pictures - [link]
Life Squared - Dante Hotel - gallery
Building the Dante Hotel - gallery
Life Squared - an animated archive - a talk in Manchester
Archive and memory in virtual worlds
Life Squared Montreal and http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/LynnHershman/1146 and http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/LynnHershman/1140
With Lynn Hershman in Seed Magazine
Some discussion:
