Life Squared is a project in the online world Second Life to remix the archive of a work created by artist Lynn hershman Leeson in 1972.
Who is regenerating the Dante Hotel?
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.
More particularly, LifeSquared is a project of the Metamedia Lab [link], part of Stanford Humanities Lab [link]
Stanford Humanities Lab - SHL - is a Center for Transdiciplinary Study. We run and coordinate experimental projects that link the humanities with art, science and technology. Experiments - taking risks. A Lab - collaborative, co-creative and team-based. Involving a triangulation of arts practice, commentary/critique, and outreach beyond the academy into industry and the public sphere. Always simultaneously research, pedagogy, and publication. And practice - we don't just comment and discuss the posthuman in contemporary digital culture, or whatever, we build - new media, interactive archives, predictive models of social change, art exhibitions ... .
SHL believes that some crucial questions about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, the boundaries of culture and nature, transcend the old divisions between the arts, sciences and humanities, between the academy, industry and the cultural sphere. Especially today - with new developments in bio-tech, digital culture, global society.
So SHL has a transhuman and transdisciplinary agenda to
- animate archives - regenerate, bring to life and use the store houses of human, cultural, artistic, scientific achievement - a focus on the great question of the relationship of the human past to our efforts at conservation and preservation
- build bigger pictures - put specialized in-depth research into the context of the big human questions facing us all today - questions, for example, of rapid social change and innovation, the ethical implications of information technology, the character of distributed digital communities, the politics of digital citizenship
- facilitate co-creative collaborative work - as a complement to the figure of the lone scholar - and because the whole is always more than the sum of the parts.
Metamedia is located in Stanford Archaeology Center and works to understand the materialities of media, the convergence of things and expression ...
because "we are all archaeologists now", in modernity, working on what is left of the past
- sorting things out in acts of re-collection
- fascinated when we realize that "this happened here"
- with a forensic outlook that "at a scene of crime anything might be relevant"
- concerned with "what becomes of what was" - what comes after the event - loss, decay, document, and regeneration
- wondering - is this me, is this who we are? - these traces, these remains of what was ...
Why an articulation of archaeology and (new) media?
- Because the past, to live, has always to be brought into the present - visualized, written about, re-presented in its traces, mediated
- Mediation is thus at the heart of time, historicity and memory
- And we do well to remember the materiality of all media, understanding our writing, visualization, our conversation, our work in video and sound as material modes of engagement with objects, environments, each other.
