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.

Themes

Life Squared is about building an experience in an online world. It is a new work by Lynn Hershman. It is also a research project investigating themes such as the following:

• How is a work of art such as a transient installation in a hotel room to be curated by a museum?

• How is an experience that takes no particular material form to be documented?

• Memory and document - memory practices and material archives - 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 this archival encounter that challenges 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, a prosthesis, 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.

Discussion

Archive 3.0 - how Life Squared is a new kind of archive.

Documenting the past - how the past is not a datum to be recorded "as it was", but a vector, an iterative chain of reworkings, remixings, recreations.

[link] Gabriella Giannachi introduces the work of Lynn Hershman

Impressions from Second Life - the prosthetic world

Hershman archive - preliminary listing - the archival basis of Life Squared