Stories From Second Life: Hotwire Island and Lynn Hershman Leeson

We have all experienced the sometimes strange and mind-bending intersection of real and virtual in Second Life. Just before Thanksgiving I had the opportunity to attend an exhibit at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which features a build in Second Life called Dante Hotel on an island known as Hotwire.

[Note, please see the blog post http://blog.secondlife.com/2009/01/05/stories-from-second-life-hotwire-island-and-lynn-hershman-leeson/ for images and links.]

The SFMOMA exhibit intends to “examine how artists have engaged members of the public as essential collaborators in the art-making process”. The corresponding exhibit in Second Life displays the archives of a remarkable artist and film maker, Lynn Hershman Leeson.

[see the blog for image: Viewing the Dante Hotel in Second Life from SFMOMA]

Lynn rezzed in Second Life in 2005 when Henry Lowood and others at the Stanford Humanities Lab suggested Second Life as an appropriate place to migrate some of her archived projects which were housed at the Stanford Library. Her goal was to make her history accessible digitally, and the project came into being as Life Squared.

Maybe because it felt so familiar to my experience as an avatar, I found the Roberta Breitmore story, showcased in its own room at the Hotel, to be especially intriguing. For years Roberta Breitmore was a “private performance of a simulated person”; a fascinating exploration of what it’s like to express yourself, even partially, through another personality. You can meet the latest incarnation of Roberta at the Dante Hotel in Second Life, where she is currently serving as a guide for the SFMOMA museum attendees.

[ see the blog for images and links Roberta Breitmore 1974-1978]

For a performance artist such as Lynn, Second Life adds a new dimension to the original exploration of the work. As she describes it, “By putting the archive of my work in Second Life, I was able to transcend the original essence of the piece into a new, hybrid interactive and participatory structure. “

As a backdrop for her digital archive, Lynn and the team from Stanford (Michael Shanks, Henry Lowood, Jeffrey Shanks, Henrik Bennetson, Henry Seligsman and Jeff Aldrich) decided to recreate the Dante Hotel in Second Life. The Dante Hotel was the real-life scene of one of her earliest works, a living piece of art that she implemented in collaboration with Eleanor Coppola. Today the Dante Hotel in Second Life serves as both a re-creation of the original piece, and as the gallery for a series of other exhibits of Hershman’s work, including the current SFMOMA show.

[for images see the blog post, wire-island-and-lynn-hershman-leeson/
Selected documentation of The Dante Hotel, Hotwire Island, Second Life]

You can read more about the SFMOMA exhibit here, and here. (wire-island-and-lynn-hershman-leeson/)

Visit the Dante Hotel on Hotwire Island in Second Life:
SLurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Hotwire/111/110/28

Comments? Thoughts? Discuss here in the forums!

This is called Roleplaying and/or Acting, and Hundreds of Thousands, if not Millions of people do this every day in so many multitudinous forms it's impossible to name them all.

However, I have to agree, if you wanted to explore that, SL is ideal, anonymous avatars definitely make up for a lack of RP/Acting skills (sometimes).

Typo: My RL name is "Henry Segerman", not "Henry Seligsman". I think you also mean "Jeffrey Schnapp" rather than "Jeffrey Shanks".

You need to promote more of this kind of stuff. It's a nicely put together project, it does highlight both the advantages and disadvantages of a virtual world, the pro's of being able to make such a recreation and the cons of not having a convenient way of delivering a programme.

@Seifert - my apologies for the errors. I've updated the blog to make the corrections.

@Ciaran - thanks - I hope to continue to contribute posts like this one.

I'm glad you like this project, I do too even though I haven't visited yet, but I will do so soon. As you are obviously aware, this project archives the creativity of this artist and work completed in Real Life and that is a very important event.

However, there should be similar dialogue with the Second Life art community too, actually more importantly too. Second Life needs to archive it's historical art references and culture as well, although obviously it would be an impossible task to archive all the amazing builds and art in Second Life's past, present and future in a 3-dimensional way, Linden Lab should realise soon that it is and will be the artistic and cultural achievements of Second Life that will be long remembered, more so than the failed short term corporate excursions into Second Life.

I believe if this artistic cultural side of Second Life isn't started to be archived in someway soon, the day will come in the future when LL could sorely regret not starting such a project. Because presently the loss of so many open space islands and the new price increase is also the loss of many amazing builds and SL art at this time in SLs history, for example AM Radio's The Quiet which has now gone.

I couldn't agree more Dekka. Is there a group that you would recommend talking with to figure out how something like this might work?

I've contacted some people who may well be interested in this and pointed them to the blog and this forum thread.

RL disclosure!! RL disclosure!! RL disclosure!!

/me ARs Seifert!

For those not familiar with the idea of role playing within an already virtual world, the following video may be helpful:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/warcraft_sequel_lets_gamers_play

Hi Robin, Hi everyone- Dekka pointed me to this thread and I agree that LL would be well served by taking steps to preserve or archive some of the most important and historically significant (we'd be guessing of course about that but we could make good guesses) artworks that are getting created for this new medium. Maybe certain things could be given the equivalent of "national monument" status (ie given space in the world, open to the public and preserved from harm). The problem, of course would be deciding what things were worthy, and if you ask me, there should be an approach that recognizes the fact that what one social circle thinks is really important, another group might not care about. I'm not saying its all relative - I think that the stuff that I think is important is REALLY important, and I could make arguments about why, I'm just recognizing that, even though i'm right, I'll never convince some people. --

Who am I ? I'm from Brooklyn is Watching, which is a project that brings art experts and art fans from the New York contemporary art scene into contact and dialogue with the blossoming world of SL art. One of our upcoming podcasts will have Lynn Hershman Leeson as a guest, and our podcast regulars include design and art teachers from Parsons School of Design, an Art History professor from FIT and the Director of Digital Education at the Museum of Modern Art. Artwork that is Rezed on our sim is seen on a 52 inch screen in a brooklyn art gallery in the thriving artsy neighborhood williamsburg. The podcast crew, and the audience in that gallery is going to be most interested in artworks that use the medium of second life in novel ways, or in ways that expand the viewer's understanding of the medium or connect the viewer to artist's personal experience in ways that seem especially genuine or honest. They will favor work that takes into account the conditions of its own creation and uses its aesthetic vocabulary in a way that seems self-aware and deliberate. They're going to admire subtlety, and beauty, but especially things that are beautiful in unconventional or surprising ways. They're also going to be interested especially in artworks that connect in some ways to the conversation that is happening in the contemporary art world generally.

Obviously, I'm trying to make the case for us being good people to talk to- but there would be several others that I'm aware of - Rubiyat Shatner at Ars Virtua, The crew from ArtHole and ArtHole Radio, the folks involved with Art Center (http://virb.com/artcenter), Odyssey, the crew involved with Second Front, and AngryBeth's pencil factory - I'm sure there's tons of people i'm forgetting or that I don't even know about, but that's a good list of people off the top who's list of favorites I bet I'd have a lot of overlap with.

So what I think LL should do is set up some kind of system where people that are contemporary fine art enthusiasts got to choose items for induction into some kind of hall of fame - i'm sure there would be lots of arguments...but that could be fun -- what if there was an SL preservation institution with a rotating (elected? appointed?) board of directors who got to pick a certain number of places or things per month to put on the preservation list?

You might have to have several- one for each of several sub-cultures because the stuff that the contemporary fine art people would pick would be stuff that lots of other people couldn't care less about...... although they should.

I'm sure other people will have better ideas for how this could work, I'm just glad that Dekka got us talking about it.