[iDC] Anyone using SL
Lynn Hershman
lynn2 at well.com
Thu Jan 7 14:42:03 UTC 2010
I appreciate hearing about these iimportant projects. Yet another
chime, in that I wanted to re iterate this SL project and re-
performance of Roberta and The Dante Hotel in 2006 , when there were
about 75,000 SL members. It still is performed continually as an
installation: 2007 at the Museum of Fine Arts Montreal, 2009 at SF
MOMA 2010 at S.F. Cameraworks. Each time it is different, but
mostly uses web cams to create a live exposure, and multiple viral
ized avatars to underscore the blur.
Below are some thoughts about creating the first conceptual
architecture for this work:
Second Thoughts on Second Life and Life Squared
The Life Squared project sprung out of the desire to reanimate my
archive, located in the Special Collections Library at Stanford
University, using Second Life. I wanted to extend my archive into
digital, accessible space, and worked with the Stanford Humanities
Lab to achieve this goal.
There are profound philosophical implications to working within the
territory of an animated social network that relies on a fictional
history as its spine.
Among the ideas generated by this project was the fact that nothing
is ever lost, it simply transforms to a new and perhaps more relevant
form, enabling renewed interpretations. What does life extension
mean in this world that defies gravity? Can/should avatars die?
When I lost my avatar named Ssofft, I felt a profound sense of loss,
similar to a death. When she later revived, I was deeply relieved.
I had embedded in her a unique experience and I was not ready to have
her disappear. By putting the archive of my work in Second Life, I
was able to transcend the original essence of the piece into a new,
hybrid interactive and participatory structure. Converting the
archive into a digital format of hybrid genre allows users of the
content to dynamically revisit the past while simultaneously
expanding the audience for this material.
For this exhibition (‘SFMOMA’), we created virtual replica rooms ‘in
Second Life’ of every installation participating in the distributed
network exhibition plus we included The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,
where the Life Squared installation originated in September of 2007.
The following are thoughts that were written by a team of individuals
working on this project at the Stanford Humanities Lab. The other
participants were Michael Shanks, Henry Lowood, Jeffrey Shanks,
Henrik Bennetson, Henry Seligsman and Jeff Aldrich.
Implementing the technologies of online game communities and
pervasive media will instigate a hybrid genre. Archives derived from
past materials, but digitally relocated, become the content for a
"meta-archive” that will facilitate deeper analysis, investigation
and exploration of the original work. Using emerging and pervasive
technology as part of the structure will be a pioneering method of
engaging the archaeology of space, the plasticity of time and the
multi-layered interpretations of embedded artifacts.
The Dante Hotel is an archaeological space through which people pass,
leaving clues about their identities. As Lynn put it in an interview
about the Dante Hotel project, "once someone has occupied a hotel
room, we can find out who they were by what they've left behind."
So the project aims at nothing less than converting the archive into
wholly new works that are created in a mixed reality architecture and
environment. This means reshaping the archival experience as active,
fragmented, exploratory, and personal.
The Dante Hotel* Part 1 1973 and Part 2 2006
San Francisco, California
June 2006 – ? (infinite, if possible)
The original Dante Hotel project began in 1972, as a collaboration
with Eleanor Coppola. Hershman and Coppola rented rooms in a rundown
hotel located in the Italian neighborhood of San Francisco. The
artists installed objects in the room, creating one of the first
public art installations outside of a traditional gallery space in
the United States. Hershman's room presented traces of a life -
fragments or clues to an identity but also set specifically in the
site. The work provided a strategic jumping off point in several
respects: it opened themes that would continue as threads through
Hershman's life as an artist; it began a life chronology reflected
both in biography and the Stanford archives; it occupied a historical
space in a specific time, which can be explored through historical
and archaeological methods; and it reconfigured a public space as
artistic space in ways that were stealthy and ambiguous.
The recent version of The Dante Hotel is an investigation of a
simulated hotel room, in real life, in real time, that examines the
context of its own location. It is set inside the user’s social space
of Second Life.
Hershman’s statement for the Second Life project incorporates the
following description:
A new “bot” character will be created:
1) to use innovative technologies to investigate archives and develop
new digital models for introducing new forms of active engagement
with them
2) to create a new context for the investigation of contemporary art
3) to expand the audience for archives and contemporary art
4) to instigate a hybrid genre through which to rework cultural archives
In the 1972 version of The Dante Hotel, visitors would enter the
Dante building, sign in at the desk, and receive keys to the rooms.
Residents of this transient hotel became "curators" of the
exhibition. The room, number forty-seven, re-created the ambience of
presumed former inhabitants’ stay based on materials gathered from
the neighborhood, including books, eyeglasses, cosmetics, and
clothing, all clues to their possible identity. A radio broadcast of
local news in counterpoint to the sound of audiotaped breathing was
installed under the bed. Pink and yellow light bulbs draped shadows
over two life-sized wax cast women in bed. Above them was wallpaper
made of repeated photographs of the room itself. The presence of
these repeated photographs lends itself to the idea of replicated
digital imagery that is available to be cloned and reused by Second
Life’ visitors.
In Life Squared, visitors enter the hotel when they click on a blue
box that signs them into the project, and then click on a red box
that gives them a key to open the hotel door. The space is a remix
now of original photographs, from the archive of The Dante Hotel,
with virtual avatars trespassing, changing things and leaving their
trail. Instead of a desk clerk, there is a “bot” guide named Dante,
who guides visitors to the room. Further details can be found by
visiting the link to the Stanford Humanities Lab Site: http://
slurl.com/secondlife/NEWare/219/154/26/
In the original Dante Hotel piece, Eleanor Coppola kept her room open
for one week. Coppola hired a friend, Tony Dingman, to live in the
private space of room forty-three and be available to be watched
whenever visitors came to the exhibit. Polaroid shots of the objects
in the room and the subtle changes made through time were taped to
the wall.
My room was intended to stay open permanently, twenty-four hours a
day, gathering dust and being perpetually reconstructed by the flux
and changes that occurred naturally through viewers’ interaction. The
Second Life experience is basically the same, but reframed to the
installation space of a screen.
The floor of the Second Life building is designed on top of the
actual floor plan retrieved from City Hall, an apt ground work for
the piece.
In 1973, nine months after our rooms opened to the public, a man
named Owen Moore visited the rooms at 3:00 a.m. Viewing the room in
the dead of night, he thought the wax bodies were corpses and phoned
the police. The authorities took all the elements— including the wax
cast heads—to central headquarters (an apt name, in this case) where
they still remain to be claimed, an apt closure to the piece. I have
written to the police station to find the remains. The remains of
the Second Life piece will be determined by the stability of the
program.
Hundreds of people visited The Dante Hotel, checked in at the desk
and received a key to trespass the room at will. In fact, The San
Francisco Chronicle ranked it one of the Ten Most Important Art
Exhibitions in 1972, just after Watercolors by John Marin at the
Palace of Fine Arts. Lets hope hundreds of thousands of people
trespass L2. But can you call it that, since trespassing is part of
the instigating idea of the piece?
Second Life is owned by Linden Labs, which is located less than a
mile from the Dante hotel. Henrik Bennetson, the Project Director
for this project rode past the hotel daily and took photographs of
what it has become.
*Background:
The Dante Hotel was among the first site-specific art works in the
United States. In fact, the term “site-specific” for this genre of
art did not yet exist. Like Duchamp's ideas of readymades, The Dante
Hotel functioned as a "found environment”. The Dante Hotel became one
of the first “alternative spaces” or “public site-specific art”
artwork produced in the United States.
NOTE: The project was conceived in 1971, during my exhibition in the
University Art Museum in Berkeley where I simulated the space of a
hotel room. I used found materials, (including blood and sheets) as
well as wax figures and audio tapes. The museum would have preferred
an exhibition of delicate pencil drawings. When I refused to exchange
the drawings for the installation, the curators prematurely closed my
exhibit, saying that "audio tapes" were media, (with a small ‘m’),
not art, and should not be shown in an Art Museum. I realized that
instead of bringing the hotel room to the museum, it might be more
appropriate to bring the museum exhibition to a real hotel room.
Note: Portions of this text were drawn from an outline written by
Michael Shanks, Henry Lowood and myself as we were planning for this
project.
On Jan 6, 2010, at 8:23 AM, Alan Sondheim wrote:
>
>
> Just to chime in here - I've worked in SL for several years now;
> this has
> included an installation in the artists space Odyssey. You can find
> out
> more about Odyssey at http://odysseyart.ning.com/ which is a fairly
> active
> site. I've written extensively on virtuality - this was gathered by a
> small theory-oriented press - The Accidental Artist: Fort/Da -
> http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-accidental-artist/
> 4965130
> http://stores.lulu.com/publicdomaininc . SL provides an incredibly
> supple
> environment for art-making (including choreography, installation,
> perform-
> ance, etc.). There are two main cultural uses that should be mentioned
> here - sex, which is rampant (and the programming is highly-
> creative; I've
> never understood why it's not considered an artform), and
> 'standard' two-
> and three-dimensional artworks which are in a great number of
> galleries
> all over SL. I'm surprised that Gazira Babeli's work hasn't been
> mentioned
> - s/he's one of the most astute artists I've seen in any world,
> creating
> performances/objects/installations that do things with great
> 'somatic' and
> theoretical import.
>
> - Alan
>
> ==
> email archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
> webpage http://www.alansondheim.org sondheimat gmail.com, panix.com
> ==
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