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Lynn Hershman Leeson: Autonomous Agents
A Real + Second Life Symposium
Saturday 24 November 2007, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester + Second Life, 1.00pm – 5.00pm GMT
A Real + Second Life Symposium, a collaboration between The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester and The Presence Project, coincides with the major retrospective exhibition Autonomous Agents: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson. The Guardian’s preview of the show spoke of Hershman as an artist for whom the creation of self-identity is less a vain game than a matter of profound political import’.
Working in performance, installation, video and film, new media and technology, Lynn Hershman Leeson has explored identity, politics, surveillance and artificial intelligence, operating at the vanguard of artistic innovation from the 1960s onwards.
A Real + Second Life Symposium considers the accumulation of Hershman Leeson’s practice and its habitation within live space, cinematic space, the buildings of museums and galleries and most recently, the virtual space of Second Life.
Through 20 minute long presentations, a range of academics and artists will talk about Hershman Leeson’s practice, as well as identity, politics, surveillance and artificial intelligence. Confirmed speakers include Prof Gabriella Giannachi (Centre for Intermedia, Exeter University), Prof Amelia Jones (University of Manchester), Prof Nick Kaye (Centre for Intermedia, Exeter University) Prof. Michael Shanks (Faculty Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center, California) and Prof. Jackie Stacey (University of Manchester) as well as the artist herself - Lynn Hershman Leeson.
This free symposium will take place in real life in The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester on Saturday 24 November 2007 1.00pm – 5.00pm GMT and on the same day in Second Life at 3.30pm – 4.30pm GMT. Contact susan.fletcher@manchester.ac.uk for Second Life location.
Autonomous Agents, A Real + Second Life Symposium is in collaboration with The Performing Presence Project, a four-year partnership between University of Exeter, Stanford University and University College London funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK and with the support of Stanford Humanities Lab, California. Performing Presence is available at: http://presence.stanford.edu/
Booking
To book a place at this free symposium please call Sue Fletcher on 0161 275 7472 (Mon, Wed & Thurs) or email susan.fletcher@manchester.ac.uk
Lynn Hershman Leeson's exhibition, Autonomous Agents open at the University of Manchester's Whitworth Art Gallery on Saturday 15th September.
from Phantom Limb series (1988-)
Running through until 12th December, this is the first retrospective of Lynn's work to be presented in the UK and ranges from the creation of Roberta Brietmore in San Francisco in the 70's, through to Lynn's recent collaborations with Tilda Swinton.
DiNA (2004-)
Autonomous Agents will also present Life to the Second Power, Lynn's reanimation of her archive through Second Life in collaboration with colleagues at Stanford University as part of The Presence Project.
from Life to the Second Power (2006-)
For more details of Autonomous Agents, please follow this link to The Whitworth Art Gallery http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/exhibitions/future/autonomousagents/
Follow this link for a streamed discussion on video of Life to the Second Power between Lynn Hershaman Leeson and Michael Shanks, published in Seed Magazine, August 2007 http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/08/seed_salon_lynn_hershman_leeso.php
Following an intensive period of work at the UCL CAVE between February and July 2007 at UCL we are now beginning the process of analysing the outcomes of the first of our two experiments in VR.
During this period, Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, Mel Slater, David Swapp, Marco Gillies, with performer Annie Hudson, developed a mixed reality scenario in CAVE to test hypotheses defined in response to the our series of Performing Presence practice/research workshops in Exeter during 2006.
Using sophisticated motion capture and software, and developed as an interactive performative scenario between avatar, performer and participant, the experiment provided us with a wealth of qualitative and quantitative outcomes, including interviews, questionnaires and data recording physiological responses to the experience.
The outcomes of this process will feed into key project publications as well as shaping our developing work within CAVE. More images and details of the experiment will be available on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/645
The documentation of the workshops on which this process draws, and interviews with many of the contributing artists, including Tim Etchells, Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes, Fiona Templeton, and Phillip Zarrilli, are now available on the Presence Project Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu
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...
The world premiere of Blast Theory's Day of The Figurines opens on Thursday 28th September 2006.
The Board (photo: Blast Theory)
Gabriella Giannachi has been documenting the development of the work on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/627
In Berlin, Gabriella will extend this work by tracking her experience of the game at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/758 .
This documentation will continue to evolve over the following 24 days of play.
The Locarno (photo: Blast Theory)
Day Of The Figurines is the world's first MUD (Multi User Domain) for mobile phones. Blast Theory describe it as 'a mass participation artwork using mobile phones that is part board game and part secret society'. They write:
Set in a fictional English town that is littered, dark and underpinned with steady decay, the game unfolds over 24 days, each day representing an hour in the life of the town. Up to 1000 players place their plastic
figurines onto the board. They are moved by hand in a meticulous performance throughout the duration of the exhibition
Players participate by sending text messages. They must help other players as they receive updates from the town, missions and dilemmas. They can also chat to players who are near them in the town using text messages as events unfold in the town: a gig by Scandinavian death metallists, an invasion by a Middle Eastern army, a summer fete.
Day Of The Figurines will be running from Thursday 28th September to 21st
October 2006 from 4 to 8pm at HEBBEL AM UFER HAU 2: Hallesches Ufer 32 / 10963 Berlin.
   
The first part of Andrea Zapp's current current work, Eye 2 Eye will open on 16 June.
Eye 2 Eye – Networked Installation is developed for the Okno Gallery in Cheljabinsk, Russia. her partners onsite are Dmitry Lathukin and Svetlana Shlyapnikova from the Okno Gallery. The gallery's website is at http://www.oknogallery.ru/en/index.html
Andrea will be showing the work locally via a LAN connection at the summer festival at the GI in Moscow on the 16th of June and then travel on to the Urals, to set up the work as a networked link between theUral State University (Ekaterinburg) [http://www.usu.ru/] and South Ural State University (Chelyabinsk)
Andrea describes the piece:
Two remote identical black wooden boxes are connected via the Internet using I Sight cameras and an I Chat video interface.
Visitors glimpse through a small peephole into the box. An invisible camera inside on the opposite wall captures their eyes and transfers it to the other box, where it is displayed underneath the camera on a small round-shaped projection screen and vice versa. Both participants exchange their views in real-time, looking into each other’s eyes.
This surveillance interface inside the box is embedded into a stage like miniature set of an earth globe below and amidst a starry sky with little colourful planets dotted around that seem to float in the space. It recalls a satellite perspective, which is underlined by the surveillance interface above; but the view onto this small universe glowing in the dark, reminiscent of toys even, implicates ironic commentaries in itself – resulting in thoughts about who controls and who observes whom in a more globally networked sense
Image courtesy Andrea Zapp.
Andrea Zapp's website is at: http://www.azapp.de/
On 24 May, 12.30-4.30, Fiona Templeton will present the fifth of our Presence Research Workshops here at Exeter.
Fiona Templeton, YOU - The City (1988), Greg Archinega
photo: Zoe Beloff
Fiona's workshop will focus on Audience Interaction.
She writes:
Theatre that interacts with the audience must consider the audience themselves as an area of skill to be developed. This has become far more sophisticated than notions of "audience participation" which risked (or played with) the audience's discomfort. Technological "interaction" is now familiar, but live interaction functions differently to the machine. The audience's part in an interaction can not wholly be surmised, and specific research is needed if interaction is to become more refined, responsive and complex. The inclusion of audiences in the development of the work from the beginning, therefore, is, I hope, not only an "opportunity to take part" but an opportunity to shape and have ownership of arts experiences. In the Afterword to my book YOU-The City I wrote "Theatre is the art of relationship." So research into the relationship of a specific work to its audience is also for me work on a model for further relationships between the art and its public.
Fiona's work ranges widely across many disciplines. She has been awarded fellowships from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts in both Poetry and Visual Arts (new genres); an ''Abendzeitung Muenchen Sterne des Jahres'' for theatre; and two fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts for performance, as well as one for playwriting. She was 1996-7 Senior writer-in-residence at the English Faculty of Cambridge University, England, and 2000-2003 Arts and Humanities Research Board fellow with the Department of Theatre Studies, University of Lancaster, England. In December 2002 she received the annual Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts grant for theatre in New York.
Her award-winning and influential YOU--The City, "an intimate citywide play for an audience of one", has since been recreated in six countries and languages, including at the London International Festival of Theatre in 1989, and most recently as a key project of Rotterdam Cultural Capital of Europe 2001.
  
Recognition (1996).
Images: Fiona Templeton.
Long-term, she is writing a project for multiple directors, Realities, consisting of 5 interrelated plays. Her work created in collaboration with the late Michael Rotamski, Recognition, the first of these pieces, was produced at the Kitchen, New York, the ICA, London, and the Cambridge Conference on Contemporary Poetry 1996-7. The second work, Borders, was written for Gledalisce Glej, Ljubljana, Slovenia. The third , The Medead, is in progress. It is a play that retells the whole life-story of Medea, for 10 performers, to be produced by the Glasgow Tramway and the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, and has involved research into the origins of the Medea figure in what is now the Republic of Georgia.
Audience places for the workshop are free. The workshop will take place in Theatre Studio 2, in Drama's new complex, The Alexander Building, Thornlea, University of Exeter. Details of how to find us are here http://www.projects.ex.ac.uk/performing-presence/How%20to%20find%20us.php
To book an audience place at the workshop please contact l.m.dowsett@exeter.ac.uk
A fuller discussion of Fiona's work is available through the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/352
Fiona's website is at http://www.fionatempleton.org/
Images reproduced courtesy Fiona Templeton.
Future Presence workshops will be conducted by:
Bella Merlin (21 June)
Paul Sermon is creating a new, site-specific telepresence work in Taipei, Taiwan. To enable this commission, Paul will be working in the studios at Taipei Artist's Village (TAV) until 6 May.
Gabriella Giannachi has begun a dialogue with Paul, published on the Presence Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/500, following the process of making the piece.
Paul writes:
Some images attached of the locations I have visited. The Chinese housing complex I spoke about is called Treasure Hill, this was a really inspiring space and several of the houses have been purchased by the city government and turned into artist studios/galleries.
The artists are working with a lot of found objects and using the space as living/working/studio/exhibition environments, turning one of the spaces into a bar also.
But in general I don't think it is possible to use the space for a media art installation, it's just not secure enough, it's also very damp and electrical supplies are not reliable.
But anyway - very inspiring. I'm also attaching a photo from The Huashan Culture Park I visited Wednesday to give you some idea of the scale of the space.
They also have some small studio/bedroom spaces here at Taipei Artists Village which I could use to produce an installation work which could draw some of the thoughts gathered from Treasure Hill. I will talk more about the concept emerging here in my next email.
I'm intrigued by your [Gabriella's] notion absentness in the telepresent space. In my work/notion nothing is absent but rather becoming redefined - the absence of touch is embodied in the expanded sense of sight. The same could be said for blind person - the absence of sight is embodied in the expanded sense of touch or sound. Can we expand this to cultural experience?
Over the next three months we will be following and documenting Paul's process.
Matt Adams of Blast Theory has accepted a four year University Fellowship here at Exeter.
During our collaboration Matt will be associated with the Centre for Intermedia http://www.ex.ac.uk/drama/research/intermedia/welcome.shtml
Led by Matt, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj, Blast Theory is renowned internationally as one of the most adventurous artists’ groups using interactive media, creating groundbreaking new forms of performance and interactive art that mixes audiences across the internet, live performance and digital broadcasting.
Day Of The Figurines, 2005. Copyright Blast Theory. Photo: Nicola Dove.
For the past four years Blast Theory has been exploring the convergence of online and mobile technologies in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab at University of Nottingham http://www.mrl.nott.ac.uk/
Day Of The Figurines is a major new project being developed with MRL alongside Sony Net Services and the Fraunhofer Institute as part of the European research project IPerG (Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming).
The piece was piloted in July-August 2005 and will be fully developed through 2006.
Mapping players’ real-time gaming via mobile phones from any location, through figurines occupying a model of a fictional city, Day Of The Figurines explores action, identity and interaction in reversals and exchanges between real and virtual social and political spaces.
Day Of The Figurines, 2005. Copyright Blast Theory. Photo: Nicola Dove.
Blast Theory describe the premise of the piece:
Day of The Figurines is set in a model of a fictional city that is littered, dark and underpinned with steady decay. From the Gasometer to Product Barn, the Canal to Rat Research Institute, up to 100 players roam the streets, defining themselves through their interactions. A gunship of Arabic troops appears on the High Street. Scandinavian metallists play a gig at the Locarno that goes horribly wrong. How players respond to these events and to each other creates and sustains a community during the course of a single day in the city.
The company has also been commissioned to create a major, new permanent installation for THEpUBLIC in West Bromwich UK, due to open in 2006.
Using Augmented Reality, Flypad will generate avatars from a 'data body' - information submitted by visitors on their entry to the gallery and as they progress through the space.
Flypad. Permanent commission for THEpUBLIC's new building, West Bromwich, to be launched in 2006. Copyright Blast Theory.
At the installation, up to twelve players will be able to fly their avatars through the gallery’s large central atrium, while attempting holds and forming moves with other avatars.
In its appearance, Flypad draws on Peking Opera, Mexican wrestling, facemasks, and skydiving.
Matt suggests that:
The whole work springs from the architectural location [….] What we're trying to do is make sure that the virtual representation and the real space which sits around it are as seamlessly interlinked as possible, that there's a very fluid relationship between the two [...] the sense of play that you will experience as you dart between real and virtual, and experience the frisson of this difference, is a very important part of the pleasure of it.
Blast Theory's complex and immersive game-structures distribute player-presence across multiple and incongruent sites and networks.
During Matt’s Fellowship we will be developing critical frameworks through which to engage with Blast Theory’s radical work.
As part of this, we will be documenting the development of work by the company through the Presence Project Collaboratory.
Blast Theory’s website is at http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/
Early in the New Year we will begin documenting Paul Sermon’s development of a new commission for the opening of THEpUBLIC museum in West Bromwich, UK http://www.thepublic.com/.
Telematic Embrace will be a permanent installation in place from August 2006.
These images from Paul’s prospectus for the project are from Telematic Vision (1992), which inspires this new work.
Paul’s site-specific installations employ telematics to explore mutual interaction and user-determined narrative between remote participants.
Participants interact with others in physically dispersed sites by observing their own ‘human avatar’ representations in a telepresent space.
Paul describes how this is enabled:
Through the use of live chroma-keying and videoconferencing technology these divided audience participants enter a video installation and initially suppose they entering a passive space - sitting, standing or sometimes lying within it. Their presence within the space is recorded live on video camera and mapped in real-time, via a chroma-key video mixer, with an identical camera view of another participant in an identical installation space – combining two shots of live action by replacing a blue or green back drop in one image with the image of the other. The two spaces which can be any geographical distance apart are linked via a videoconference connection, making it possible to link and combine these telematic installations and their performing audiences between almost any location in the world.
These installations provoke an uncanny sense of presence in conflations between proximity and distance, intimacy and removal.
Paul argues that:
All technology is a development of language - a means of construction and interpretation of an environment. The definition of the virtual and real are all part of the same linguistic construct. Technology/language is not an apparatus or attachment of the body, but rather an extension of it.
For the user, remote participants come closer in a sense of presence divided between sites, actions and interactions.
Paul’s website is at http://www.paulsermon.org/
A context for this documentation of Paul’s work is already being developed on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/PaulSermon/Home
Images courtesy Paul Sermon.
Human Avatars is a networked media art installation by Andrea Zapp, with a soundtrack by Vini Reilly of Manchester’s Durutti Column.
The installation was launched in Manchester, UK, in October 2005 as part of the exhibition ‘Storyrooms,’ curated by Andrea at the Museum of Science and Industry.
‘Storyrooms’ explores interactive networks, media art and installation through work by Susan Collins, UK; Paul DeMarinis, Stanford, USA; Ken Goldberg, USA; Paul Sermon, UK; Cornelia Sollfrank, D; Tan Teck Weng, Malaysia; and Andrea, D/UK.
In early November, Gabriella (Giannachi) and I will meet Andrea and Paul Sermon to discuss extended documentations of their work beginning in year 1 or 2 of the Presence Project.
We plan to document and respond to ‘Storyrooms’ as a context for this work, focussing on the performance of presence through interactive and performative installations exploring telepresence and communications systems.
In Andrea’s work, the occupation of places and interaction with others becomes complex and dispersed.
For Human Avatars, visitors becomes subject to a series of live, interactive mediations, in which their presence becomes the object of attention for other remote visitors, whose watching is fed back and amplified through the installation.
Andrea describes the piece:
Human Avatars creates a visual dialogue between real and virtual participants on two networked stages:
Visitors in the exhibition space discover a small wooden hut, which they are invited to enter. A live image of their body inside is projected into a remote model version of the hut, complete with model furniture, where other visitors can make contact with the tiny moving figures by peeping through a small window. Yet unaware that a second camera inside displays their peering faces back on the window of the big shed, with their eyes now overshadowing the participants inside.
The architecture and the scenario appear very playful, but the immediate interactive experience is controversial, once the voyeuristic strategy behind the idyllic backdrop becomes evident - indirectly hinting at rather ambivalent and melancholic side effects of surveillance and visual control as an intrinsic part of media and entertainment.
Andrea’s work engages with the complexities of presence formed in an interleaving of real and virtual action, meeting and place.
We will begin developing this work on the Collaboratory more fully shortly.
Andrea’s website is at http://www.azapp.de/
The ‘Storyrooms’ exhibition is at http://www.storyrooms.net/
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