On an island in SecondLife, building has commenced, constructed of traces, of remains of a past ...
of regenerated bodies ...

Life Squared is a project of encounter with the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson ...
in a mixed reality animated archive.

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.

Life Squared is a project to rework, to remix part of this archive - the remains of a work set in the Dante Hotel in San Francisco in 1972. In this, Life Squared is an animated archive and a model of the art museum of the future.

Life Squared is an experience in an online world, a prosthetic world of avatars, their buildings and goods. It raises all sorts of questions about contemporary experience, real, synthetic, mediated, technology assisted.

What is it to recollect? - in this contemporary 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? Indeed, with our identities today distributed through all manner of records and documents, our sense of self maintained by all manner of goods, technologies and media, did you ever know who you were?

Documenting the past, we propose,

is to actively reshape and rework what remains

(of the future).

Life Squared is 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.

Life Squared - main menu - quick acces to our discussions, plans and the process of making Life Squared

Life Squared - people - who is doing this?

Life Squared - commentary - discussion about the issues raised by this project

L2 - project outline - the original project plan, submitted to our funders, the Langlois Foundation

Weblog - a diary of events and comments

Thoughts about L2 event - Nov 30

News

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Life Squared is part of "The Presence Project" - and is associated with The Metamedia Lab in Stanford Archaeology Center - part of Stanford Humanities Lab