Documenting Life to the Second Power (L2)
The Stanford team and Gabriella Giannachi have started to document the presence research project Life to the Second Power (L2)
With colleagues at Stanford University the artist Lynn Hershman has been developing an online archive in 'Second Life,' a virtual world with over 1.6 million participants worldwide.
At http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/946, Gabriella Giannachi has now started to track the emergence of this project, which takes place in NEWare, an island in Second Life.
At 12:00pm PST (noon) on 30 November, the project was formally launched through a presentation in Second Life itself by the Stanford Humanities Lab in collaboration with artist Lynn Hershman: "Regenerative Presence: Remixing the Archives of Lynn Hershman Leeson." The invitation to the event announced that:
The L2 Project seeks to regenerate and re-imagine Hershman's work inside the 3D online world Second Life; it will re-animate Hershman's existing archive, 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.
Gabriella writes that:
As NEWare is beginning to take shape the traces of Lynn Hershman's archive, itself formed of traces of a lifelong commitment to an exploration of identity and presence (though often in its absence), are increasingly recognisable.
The Life to the Second Power (L2) research project is at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/LynnHershman/261 while the project blog is available at http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/LifeSquared/
Shortly, Gabriella will lead an interview of Lynn Hershman in Second Life with the collaboration of colleagues at Stanford and Exeter.
More on this to follow soon...