The Presence Project

Strange Culture - the première of Lynn Hershman's documentary "Strange Culture" at the Sundance Film Festival 22 January 2007

Stanford Humanities Lab and the Life Squared Project (part of Presence) yesterday hosted the first online movie première for the Sundance Film Festival.

The movie was Lynn Hershman's "Strange Culture" - a documentary about bio-artist Steve Kurtz.

We are working with Lynn on part of her archive at Stanford, re-animating an installation she created in 1972 with Eleanor Coppola at the Dante Hotel in San Francisco. Gabriella (Giannachi) has introduced some aspects of "Life Squared" project, as we have called it, in this blog - [Link].

Questions we are facing include:

How is a past work of art, that knew no definitive and original material form, to be re-collected (what future for the digital art museum?).

If we are to move beyond the record of the past being identified simply with its preserved remains (boxes of stuff), what might an animated archive, built with the remains of the past, look like?

Can the past be made to live again - albeit in metamorphosis, on the basis of what remains?

And we are doing this in a machinic world that immediately questions the easy distinctions we usually make between material worlds and immaterial "virtualities": images, memories, hopes, designs, fears.

Lynn's movie is about a vital, and related, issue in contemporary art.

In 2004 bio-artist and college professor Steve Kurtz was preparing for a MASS MoCA exhibition that would let audiences test whether food has been genetically modified when, days before the opening, his wife tragically died of heart failure. Distraught, Kurtz called 911, but when medics arrived, they became suspicious of his art supplies and called the FBI. Dozens of agents in haz-mat suits sifted through his home and impounded his computers, books, cat, and even his wife's body. The government held Kurtz as a suspected bioterrorist, and, nearly three years later, the charges have not been dropped. He still faces up to 20 years in prison.

Because he is legally barred from comment, the movie uses actors as avatars to tell this story of contemporary art, science, politics and paranoia.

For the CIA and FBI, Steve was working in a dangerous border zone, familiar to us from both recent events, and also in the nightmares of modernity - our ability to design, engineer and organize whole new worlds of creatures, machines, peoples. A border zone that includes clones, robots, genetic mutants ... artists and terrorists.

And avatars. Steve's is a distressing case, an important wake-up call about what culture has become. I don't think it is trivialising his experience to say that it is entirely appropriate to have such a movie shown in the likes of a "prosthetic" world as SecondLife. The boundaries between reality and virtuality have always been indistinct and permeable, constantly re-drawn. This is why I use the term "prosthetic" - extension, augmentation.

Watching the movie yesterday in the "audience" was not a "virtual" experience. The screen and sound came through clearly as cinema or TV. But this, of course, was not cinema or TV - the mode of engagement was quite different. (A favorite argument of mine is that media are to be understood now not in a traditional way, according to their material form - as "film", "video", "TV", "print" - but as different modes of engagement - hence, again, prosthetics, not virtualities.)

And what is an audience to do with the freedoms afforded an avatar? The viewing is an invitation to co-perform, to be involved. There were mutant cats and foxes in the audience, guests in haz-mat suits looking bizarrely damaged, as well as everyday ordinary-looking folk.

Not coincidentally Red Herring magazine phoned during the showing to ask about the implications of such screening for small-scale independent cultural creation - daring to inhabit edgy matters of common contemporary concern.