Proposal submitted to the Langlois Foundation

Start date

End date

Project summary

Life to the Second Power (L2) will re-animate the existing archive of Lynn Hershman Leeson, now housed in the Special Collections Library at Stanford University. Converting the archive into a digital format of hybrid genre will allow users of the content to dynamically revisit the past while simultaneously expanding the audience for this material.

An online meta-narrative will integrate real and virtual architecture, artificial intelligent avatars, artifacts, somatic characters and situational components such as site tagging, GPS, and GIs modeling into a mixed reality and pervasive gaming environment. Using content drawn from the archive, fragments of information embedded within a storyline of a crime scene will reveal multi level clues, each of which lead toward a search for lost identity. The ”missing person” will be traced through a trail of artifacts and partial and even erased information. Underlying conspiratorial motivations, duplicity, speculation, surveillance systems and rendered drawings of the tracking process will become components of this situational strategy. Characters will integrate the A.I. brains of several existing characters in the archive (Agent Ruby and DiNA). A new “bot” character will be created to incorporate deviance into the code stream.

Housing the project in Second Life, an existing online world with development tools already in place, will enable the easy integration of converging media. This project will use mixed reality and media convergence across multiple channels through which users will be invited to participate in a deeper exploration, investigation and contemplation of both the nature of archives and the context for documentation of contemporary art.

Partners include Pulse 3D Veepers System, Second Life (Linden Labs) Stanford University Library and Stanford Metamedia Lab.

Objectives

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

Implementing the technologies of online game communities and pervasive media will instigate a hybrid genre. Archives derived from past materials, but digitally relocated, will 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.

We plan a ground breaking means to synthesize and reprocess media with multiple audiences in multiple contexts and leading to more dynamic interpretations.

Phase one of this project, for which we are seeking funding from the Langlois Foundation, will draw upon archival, historical, and archaeological traces from the work "Dante Hotel" (1973). As befits a memory palace inspired by one of the first U.S. art installations outside a gallery space, we will create a public site inside the online world, Second Life.

Description

Aim - the creative reshaping of archival experience

"Life to the second power" aims to turn the archive of a prominent contemporary artist, Lynn Hershman Leeson, into a new mixed reality and dynamic experience where visitors to an online world can explore the fragmentary remains of past works and co-create new works under an overarching narrative of lost and found identities.

The context for this project is a crucial question of documentation in the contemporary arts and humanities. What comes after works of contemporary art, such as those Lynn has produced, that involve event, installation, performance, and intangible avatars and stories that raise questions about virtuality, cloning, bioethics, artificial intelligence? This question for the digital humanities concerns the archiving of works of art that have no essential material form such as text, image or artifact.

This project will address and answer this question with a new approach to the use of the archives that links insights from new media art, game technology and design, and historical-archaeological research. The usual static notion of "document" is replaced by co-creative remaking.

Objective - mixed reality co-creative game play

Rather than digitize conventional archive items such as texts, images, movies and then make them available in a static repository, this project seeks to invigorate the archives through immersion, interactivity and play. This is neither a digitization project nor a new model of access to digitized archival objects. Rather, we seek to animate the archives by giving them a second life. Our inspiration is less the reading room than a revised notion of the memory palace. In the ancient and medieval notion of the memory palace, ideas are associated with objects in places. We add to this notion an element characteristic of Hershman's work: the hotel room as an archaeological space through which people pass, leaving clues about their identities. As she put it in an interview about the Dante Hotelproject, "once someone has occupied a hotel room, we can find out who they were by what they've left behind." In order to capture this move away from static collection and object, from reading room as access space, from finding aid as guide, we will design a space through which visitors construct a personal narrative about an identity revealed through archival clues embedded in that space. This narrative will be constructed through activity in the space (play), rather than restricted to the reading of documents and compilation of information.

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.

Implementation - collaborating partners

The project will be based upon gaming technologies, designs and practices modified for the specific purpose of reanimating an archive. So a primary objective is to build an online environment of buildings and landscape peopled by avatars based upon characters from Lynn's work, digitised objects, texts, and movies, and new AI "bots" designed to introduce deviance. These will be encountered by visitors to the online world as fragments, traces and even erasures under an overarching story of tracing connections in a detective work of reconstituting a lost personal identity. In keeping with fascinating implications of new pervasive gaming, we plan an accompanying "real" world complement to the online environment, with objects and places connected to the online game play by GPS locators and site tagging.

Achieving these ambitious aims requires collaboration across new media arts and performance through game design and game studies, into digital humanities research and archival practice. The project therefore involves an interdisciplinary team to work with Lynn; this team is based mainly in several organizations at Stanford University, including Stanford Libraries (host to the Hershman archive), Stanford Humanities Lab (providing expertise in digital humanities and sponsor of the "How they got game" project), and the Metamedia Lab in Stanford Archaeology Center (affiliated with SHL and providing expertise in the field of cultural archives and media materialities).

Implementation - pilot phase

Realizing the broad implications, multiple development paths and technical explorations implied by these project aims, we are proposing that funding from this Langlois grant be devoted to an intense pilot phase of the project, which we intend to conduct in the massively multiplayer online world, Second Life <http://secondlife.com>.

During this phase, we will focus on an early work in the Leeson oeuvre, The Dante Hotel (1973), a collaboration with Eleanor Coppola. Hershman and Coppola rented hotel rooms in which they installed objects, creating one of the first public art installations outside 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. This work provides a strategic jumping off point for our larger project 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.

We start then with the Dante Hotel project, working in Second Life (a public on-line space) to create an archive that animates "what happened" through the "fragments of identity" Lynn designed as part of that piece. The visitor will have the opportunity to uncover clues about the work, the artist, and the characters by taking on the role of a detective exploring historical, archival narrative, and archaeological uses of documentation. In other words, we will work on multiple layers of the theme of documentation as "fragments of identity" - the show, the documentation of the show, the remediation of the show through a digital environment, and the game based on that environment. We will also consider the feasibility of a trial pervasive element of the game play in a "real" environment in San Francisco.

The components of this pilot phase will be:

1. the narrative history of the Dante Hotel show
2. a documentation of the show, involving
   1. the digitization and presentation of documents
   2. an archaeology of the Dante Hotel
   3. creation of media and interactive elements
3. design of the "virtual" environment of the Dante Hotel in Second Life - a remediation of the show
4. design, coding, testing of the online experience, with elements such as
   1. rich encounters with ruins, traces, fragments and atmospheric architectures
   2. discovery of documentary traces as rewards
   3. replay of visitor experiences and ability to view replays of others
   4. modes for constructing identities through the game experience, i.e., the detective narrative not only as shaped by documents, but also as shaped by individual experiences and interaction (narrative as play) in this particular nuanced space
5. interaction with the Second Life community to promote visitation to the site and integration of into the community
6. design of an immersive, interactive narrative and game that links the spaces we have created in a "convergent" way

Significance and audience

The significance of this project is that it brings an original and powerful technology and perspective to bear upon a vital convergence across the contemporary arts, popular culture, and that deepening zeitgeist focused upon fascination with the remains of the past in the present. The project is designed to enhance appreciation and active reflection upon this convergence with a broad audience that will include many who are usually not interested in contemporary art. It will also suggest models for the active mobilization of cultural archives, both institutional and personal.

Biographies of collaborating Principal Investigators

Henry Lowood

Henry Lowood is Curator for the History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections at Stanford University. He has been involved in the development of game collections in libraries and subsequent creation of a game research project at Stanford University. Lowood is co-PI on a project funded by the Stanford Humanities Laboratory (SHL): "How They Got Game: The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Videogames," and teaches courses in history of science & technology and game studies at Stanford. He is also co-director of the SHL, with Michael Shanks and Jeffrey Schnapp. Lowood is also the editor of the Current Bibliography in the History of Technology for the Society for the History of Technology. He holds an M.L.I.S. and a Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Berkeley. His c.v. is available at <http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood/vita.htm>.

Michael Shanks

Michael Shanks, the Omar and Althea Hoskins Professor of Classics at Stanford, CoDirector of Stanford Humanities Lab, senior founding faculty of Stanford's new Archaeology Center, is widely acknowledged as one of the world's most original and influential archaeological thinkers of the last twenty years. He has long worked on issues of documentation, memory and site in the contemporary arts. In 1997 he joined the European site-specific performance company Brith Gof as a director; he currently co-directs the "Presence Project" <http://presence.stanford.edu> - a major five year international effort investigating presence and mediation with fifteen of the world's most prominent performance artists. <http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks>

Lynn Hershman

see Gabriella Giannachi introduces Lynn Hershman Leeson [link]. Lynn's web site is at http://LynnHershman.com

Institutional Partners

Stanford Humanities Lab

Co-directed by Henry Lowood, Jeffrey Schnapp and Michael Shanks, SHL is an innovative initiative at Stanford designed to break the mould of research in the arts and humanities that is bound by conventional disciplinary boundaries. The Lab sponsors interdisciplinary projects under three focal themes - animated archives, building the big picture, and co-creative or collaborative research. It is a pioneer in the development of agendas in the digital humanities. <http://shl.stanford.edu>

Metamedia Lab, Stanford Archaeology Center

Closely affiliated with SHL and directed by Michael Shanks, Metamedia is a studio-based collaboratory that explores the materiality of analog and digital media in projects that range from conventional archaeological field projects documenting ancient sites, through to research into the future of media experiences in the car interior of 2015. "We are all archaeologists now" <http://metamedia.stanford.edu>

"Performing Presence: from the Live to the Simulated" - parent project for "Life to the second power"

What creates a sense of presence? The presence of a live performer ... the presence of the past ... in a memory ... in ruined remains ... the sense of 'being there' in an online community ... in a VR environment? The Presence Project is exploring such questions over five years with fifteen of the world's most prominent performance artists, in tracking their work, in collaborations, colloquia and publications, in modeling mediation and presence effects in virtual envirnments. The project is directed by Michael Shanks, Nick Kaye, Gabriella Gianacchi and Mel Slater. <http://presence.stanford.edu>

"How They Got Game" - related project

The aim of this project is to explore the history and cultural impact of a crucial segment of New Media: interactive simulations and video games. It focuses on the developments that have led to the current generation of video and PC games, particularly how they have established genres that effectively use narrative, competitive, and play structures for community-based interaction, performance and content development, and push the boundaries of computer-generated animation, graphics, and audio.

An important aspect of the project is the preservation of software, media streams, screenshots, and documentation; we are constructing a digital archive of source materials. Accomplishments of the project thus far include two significant museum exhibits that took place in 2003 and 2004, featuring installations from the worlds of computer games, art and military simulation; the Machinima Archive, a digital archival repository for this new game-based medium <http://www.archive.org/details/machinima>; the 73 Easting archives at Stanford University, which documents the most important military simulations of the 1990s; and numerous panels, conferences, and publications.

Communication of L2

The online world Second Life (created by Linden Lab) will host the pilot project. This "3-D virtual world" exists today, with more than 125,000 residents. Besides integrating digital and interactive media into an area of the world that has been acquired by the Stanford Humanities Lab, we will engage the public community of Second Life as spectators, visitors, players, readers. During the first phase, we will involve the community in events around Life to the Second Power; to this end, we may experiment with the creation of handouts, catalogs, exhibits, or other digital objects that can be exchanged inside the virtual world. A vibrant community of digital artists is active in this space, and we consider them to be a primary audience for the project, but we are just as interested in the many thousands of other participants in Second Life.

We will also work through the Stanford Humanities Laboratory (of which Shanks and Lowood are co-directors) for outreach and publicity. For example, we are currently planning a public workshop and speaking engagement by Lynn Hershman at Stanford to take place later this year.

Old summary (slightly longer - worth saving)

Life to the Second Power will reanimate the archive of Lynn Hershman Leeson in a story-based hybrid architecture, a memory palace that will enable anyone to revisit and rework the past.

An overarching metanarrative and gamespace will be sited in an online world, integrating real and virtual architectures, character avatars, artifacts, somatic characters and, in a later phase, situational components such as site tagging and GPS locators. Using content from the Hershman archive at Stanford, fragments of information embedded within the storyline of a crime scene will reveal layers of clues, each of which propel a search for lost identity. The ”missing person” will be traced through a trail of artifacts and partial, even erased information. Underlying conspiratorial motivations, duplicity and speculation, surveillance systems and rendered drawings of the tracking process will become components of this situational strategy. Characters will integrate the A.I. brains of characters in the archive (Agent Ruby and DiNA). A new “bot” character will be created to incorporate deviance.

The overall aim is deep exploration of the nature of archives and contexts for the documentation of contemporary art through an encounter with hybrid technologies in Lynn's work. It will be an exploration that challenges conventional media experience.

The online world Second Life (created by Linden Lab) will host the pilot project. This "3-D virtual world" exists today, with more than 125,000 residents, and development tools in place. We will integrate digital and interactive media into an area of the world that has been acquired by the Stanford Humanities Lab.

Collaborators include Pulse 3D Veepers System, Linden Lab, Stanford Humanities Laboratory (particularly the "How They Got Game" group), Stanford University Libraries, and the Metamedia Lab in Stanford's Archaeology Center. Broad intellectual context is provided by the international collaborative research project "Performing Presence" <http://presence.stanford.edu>.