Life Squared (L²) re-animates 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. Life Squared dialogues with the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson in the form of a mixed-reality "animated" archive developed in Second Life. The archive in question was integrated into a physical show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for E-art: New Technologies and Contemporary Art, with the physical installation, in turn, built back into the animated archive. The embedding of the virtual in the real and vice versa will continue as the work tours the world.

For over three decades in performance, photography, installations, artificial intelligence agents, artifacts, web presences and in movies, Hershman's work has explored what it is to live in a world of mediated, monitored, documented, translated, manipulated and transformed identities, corporealities, and presences. Ninety boxes of what remains of this corpus are preserved in the Stanford University archives: papers, photographs, tapes, movies, and sound recordings. Their relationship as documents to Hershman's "body" of work lies at the heart of Life Squared.

The project consists in a remix of a part of the Hershman archive that was selected because inherently resistant to traditional paper-centered approaches to conservation and documentation: a site-specific art work set in the Dante Hotel in San Francisco in 1972. Life Squared not only endows this time-based experimental piece with a second life, rendering it visitable within the framework of a richly textured critical and contextual apparatus, but it also embeds the experience of the art work within that of its recent exhibition history. It gives rise to a kind of archive within the archive within the archive...

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

Links and Linkage:

• Project wiki
• Project blog
• Additional project information and analysis is here

Life Squared is part of  "Performing presence: from the live to the simulated", an international collaborative project in arts practice as research coordinated by Nick Kaye and Gabriella Giannachi in Exeter UK, Mel Slater in UC London, and Michael Shanks, SHL Stanford.

Partners:

• Second Life (Linden Lab)
• Stanford University Libraries
• Stanford Metamedia Lab
• Daniel Langlois Foundation

Core Personnel:

• Jeff Aldrich
• Henrik Bennetsen
• Lynn Hershman
• Henry Lowood
• Jeffrey Schnapp
• Henry Segerman
• Michael Shanks