On 25 May 2007 while at Duisburg to present a paper with Matt Adams from Blast Theory for Paradoxes of the Public, Gabriella Giannachi and Soke Dinkla, new media theorist and curator, as well as head of cultural activities for Duisburg 2010, interviewed Lynn Hershman and Michael Shanks in Second Life.
There were two screens in Duisburg, one for the live broadcast through skype (showing Lynn, Michael and Henrik Bennetsen, as well as the technicians in Duisburg, Soke or myself on the smaller screen) and one for the Second Life environment showing Life to the Second Power in Second Life, with our avatars - Gabissa Sun, Gene Ware, Archaeolog Ware and Nice Losangeles who had been invited but who had no skype and so couldn't fully participate to the event. Henrik and Soke had no avatars. However, Henrik moved Lynn's avatar in Second Life while also answering questions on Life to the Second Power. I (Gabriella Giannachi) moved my own avatar but found it difficult to synchronise my movements, the interview and the live audience, so Soke asked most of the questions while I moved my avatar and interacted in written form with Gene Ware and Nice Loasangeles. In Duisburg we also had a problem with the sound, so we couldn't always hear the answers from the Stanford team.
After Soke asked an introductory question, Lynn (or maybe I should say Gene Ware, who was of course animated by Henrik) showed us around NEWare and then, probably aware of the fact that the clumsiness of my movements was upstaging everything else, teleported me into Life to the Second Power's recreation of Hershman's 1973 work Dante's Hotel. This felt strangely realistic. I remember that Gene Ware sat on the bed and started swinging her legs slowly, backward and forward. I was so stunned by this that I no longer paid attention to my real-life audience and instead of focusing on the topics for the interview, began to wonder how to swing my legs. I remember noticing that Gene Ware was dressed in red (with a dress modeled on what Tilda Swinton wore in Technolust) while in RL Lynn was wearing a blue suit. I also remember the sensation of not being sure 'where' Lynn was or indeed where I was. I had seen a number of images of the original work and was able to recognise some features even though I had never been in the original hotel. I started thinking about Eco's work on fakes - I was in a simulation of a recreation of a room of a fake guest of a real hotel some thirty-four years after the 'original' fake had been staged. Whose presence was it that I was witnessing?
Michael Shanks introduced the project by saying that as an archaeologist he was interested in how the 'remains of the past are incorporated into the present', reminding us that archives had always been intimately associated with architecture and that Second Life 'offered an architectural interface that we could explore in terms of an architectural engagement with the past.'
Sat on the bed next to Gene Ware, I remember thinking: 'I am sitting in Dante's Hotel next to Lynn Hershman'. Although I was aware that I was not in the 'original' hotel room, there was something special about being 'there' - note that I could not distinguish between Lynn Hershman and Gene Ware at all, which is particularly curious given that Gene Ware was effectively animated by Henrik. I noticed that I felt my avatar was kind of stiff, somewhat socially inept. I became aware of myself in RL and realised that I could just not 'be' in two public spaces at once.
The Duisburg audience, somewhat unfamiliar with Second Life, was following our interaction primarily through the Second Life screen though on occasion I noticed that they were bemused by our doubling between the two worlds of SL and RL as well as between the original Dante Hotel and the SL 'version' of it. I remember the audience taking copius photographs, indicating that they were quite keen to document what in many ways was already the documentation of a documentation.
Lynn Hershman talked about working 'from the past in the context of the future' and not being so much interested in 'creating a replica of what already existed' but rather reproducing a space in which photos of the past could be used in the future. This meant 'reinterpreting the past and reintroducing materials from that time into this space'. This process of re-interpretation made me think of literary translation and brought back all the debates about truth and authenticity pertinent to that field.
'Dante itself', she said, 'was a presence of absence. It was made of things that didn't exist or were just made in a temporary context for it, but then continued to live forever. So it was invigorated by doubles, both artifacts and photographs, and things in the room from the context of living there and things that were bound to be erased, displaced and moved just through the process of life'.
'The work' Hershman continued, 'is a mixture of the photographs of the past with the animations and networks of the present. We have a replica of the same wallpaper of the same hallway that was there and we have a receptionist here that was the receptionist in 1973 who has now become a guide in a bot that will lead you towards the room.'
Michael Shanks then talked about archiving as a form of 're-animation, re-performance of the past' and stated that they were interested in 'Taking what is left of the past, re-working it, re-mixing it, re-composing, re-performing, working with this dynamic of presence/absence - what is left of the past... what is gone of the past - and making something with it for a future-oriented project. So it's a temporal dynamic that we are exploring here.'
I found this fascinating since, in writing about Day of the Figurines, Steve Benford had also encouraged me to think in terms of presence and time and documentation.
Michael also talked about surveillance and raised the crucial questions: 'who are you looking at and who are you talking to when you talk to an avatar in SL? Is it a public persona, a private one, a combination of the two? Is it something we've made up? Something that we are controlling.' He then concluded: 'So those are some of the issues are to do with agency, record, documentation, and the kinds of spaces we are now seeing being available to people to control, manipulate and be controlled and manipulated by. (...) This is about the documentation of the past through its remains. It's an archaeological issue how you work on what is left of the past to recreate it in the present'.
The full interview is available at
[link]
For more information about the 'original' work Dante's Hotel see [link]
For a converstaion between Michael Shanks and Lynn Hershman on this subject see also [link]
