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. The Stanford Humanities Lab, in the form of Henrik Bennetsen and Jeff Aldrich, also participated with a Second Life tour of Life to the Second Power.

The schedule was:

Gabriella Giannachi - Introduction to Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson in conversation with Gabriella Giannachi
Amelia Jones: ‘Virtually Becoming: Lynn Hershman and/as Roberta Breitmore and Beyond’
Nick Kaye: ‘Re-placing sites: location, performance and signs of presence in Lynn Hershman¹s installation/performances.’
Jackie Stacey: ‘Feminine Masquerade as Identity Theft’
Question and Answer (Chair Gabriella Giannachi)
Second Life. Speakers: Lynn Hershman, Michael Shanks, Henrik Bennetsen, Jeff Aldrich, plus SL interventions (Chair Gabriella Giannachi)
Round Up

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Participants included:

Jeff Aldrich trained as an Industrial Designer (UC Berkeley and Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Rio de Janeiro), with a human factors focus. He maintained a design consulting firm in Brazil for 10 years, engaged in projects ranging from book design to urban transport systems. He returned to the US in the mid-1980s to join Stanford's Center for Design Research (CDR) as an R&D Engineer. In addition to participating in design projects in space medicine, assistive robotics, and others, he provided systems and network administration for this pioneering center of computer-aided design and engineering. From 1990 through 2003, he extended this networking and system support to several research and administrative units in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford's School of Engineering, and beginning in 1990 designed and deployed some of the earliest departmental and research unit web sites at the University. Currently at the Stanford Humanities Lab, Jeff advises and coordinates technology applications in humanities research projects. Most recently, he has developed broad expertise in virtual worlds and technologies for merged reality settings.

Henrik Bennetsen is Research Director, Stanford Humanities Lab. His passion is to understand creativity in online spaces through practice and research. He wrote his MSc dissertation Creativity and Community; a case study in Second Life on these matters. For the past year and a half he has been the head of the Lifesquared research project at Stanford. The idea is to explore building a 3D immersive archive of the art of Lynn Hershman inside the virtual world of Second Life. The work is currently being in the final stages of preparation for exhibition is a number of museums and a publication is planned for Fall 2007. In Fall 2006 he was a part of the Stanford course The Human and The Machine that used Second Life as a teaching tool. Before his return to the world of academia he was a professional musician in Denmark and still has a strong side interest in creative musical expression augmented by technology. Henrik Bennetsen is Danish and has a MSc. in Media Technology and games from the IT University of Copenhagen and a Bsc. In medialogy from Aalborg University. Previously he managed the Lifesquared research project at the Stanford Humanities Lab and is now research director there.

Gabriella Giannachi is Associate Professor in Performance and New Media, and Director of the Centre for Intermedia at the University of Exeter, which promotes advanced interdisciplinary research in performance and the arts through collaborations between artists, academics and scientists from a range of disciplines. She was subcontracted in Presenccia - Presence: Research Encompassing Sensory Enhancement, Neuroscience, Cerebral-Computer Interfaces and Applications (EU, Sixth Framework Programme) and is CI in ‘Performing Presence’, a four year AHRC funded investigation of presence in live, mediated and simulated environments developed in collaboration with the Metamedia Lab at Stanford University and the Department of Computer science at University College London. Her publications include: Staging the Post-Avant-Garde, co-authored with N. Kaye (2002); Virtual Theatres: an Introduction (2004); Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts, co-edited with N. Stewart (2005); ‘Exposing Globalisation: Biopolitics in the Work of Critical Art Ensemble’ (Contemporary Theatre Review, 2006); The Politics of New Media Theatre (2007); 'Pervasive Presence: Blast Theory's Day of the Figurines', co-authored with M. Adams and S. Benford, forthcoming 2008 Contemporary Theatre Review and 'Slow Time: Episodic Encounter in Blast Theory's Day of the Figurines', co-authored with S. Benford, forthcoming 2008 Theatre Journal.

Amelia Jones is Professor and Pilkington Chair in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She has organized exhibitions on feminism and contemporary art, has co-edited the anthology Performing the Body/Performing the Text (1999), and edited the volumes Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2003) and A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (2006). Following on her Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998), Jones’s recent books include Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (2004) and Self Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject. Her current projects are a co-edited volume Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History and a book tentatively entitled Identity and the Visual.

Nick Kaye is Professor of Performance Studies, in the Department of Drama, School of Arts, Languages and Literature, University of Exeter. His research focuses on post-war experimental performance, with emphasis on relationships between theatre and the development of ideas and practices in sculpture, architectural theory, conceptual and performance art, experimental music, installation, video art and video installation. His principal publications are Postmodernism and Performance (Palgrave, 1994), Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents (Harwood/Routledge, 1996), Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (Routledge, 2000), Staging the Post-Avant-Garde: Italian Performance After 1970, co-authored with Gabriella Giannachi, (Peter Lang, 2002), and Multi-Media: video – installation – performance (Routledge, 2007). He has edited special issues of Contemporary Theatre Review and Performance Research and contributed to numerous arts and theatre journals, including Performance Research, Degres, New Theatre Quarterly, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Contemporary Theatre Review, among others. He has devised and directed multi-media performances shown in Beijing, Dresden and London. He is a principal investigator for Performing Presence: from the Live to the Simulated, managed in collaboration with Gabriella Giannachi (Exeter University), Mel Slater (University College London) and Michael Shanks (Stanford University), a major research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2005-9.

Michael Shanks is the Omar and Althea Dwyer Hoskins Professor of Classical Archaeology at Stanford University. He has worked on the archaeology of early farmers in northern Europe, Greek cities in the Mediterranean, has researched the design of beer cans and the future of mobile media; currently he is exploring the Roman borders with Scotland. His lab at Stanford, Metamedia, is pioneering the use of Web 2.0 technologies in facilitating collaborative multidisciplinary research networks in design history and media materialities. As a Director of Stanford Humanities Lab he is championing experimental research and development in transdisciplinary arts and humanities. A key theme in his current lab projects is the future of The Archive. A series of critical interventions in debates about the character of the archaeological past, including the books Reconstructing Archaeology, Social Theory and Archaeology, Experiencing the Past, and Theatre/Archaeology have made him a key figure in contemporary archaeological thought. For him, archaeologists do not discover the past; they work on what remains. Archaeology, the discipline of things, is about our relationships with what is left of the past. This means we are all archaeologists now.

Jackie Stacey has just taken up a Research Chair in Cultural and Media Studies in the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures (RICC) at Manchester University. She has an interdisciplinary background in Women’s Studies (Kent) and Cultural Studies (CCCS, Birmingham). She previously worked at Lancaster University in the Sociology Department and in the Institute for Women's Studies. Her particular interest is in feminist cultural theory, film and visual studies and debates about sexuality, including queer theory. As well as being a co-editor of the journals Screen and Feminist Theory, her publications include: Star Gazing: Female Spectators and Hollywood Cinema (1994) and Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997), and (as co-author with Sarah Franklin and Celia Lury) Global Nature, Global Culture (2000). She has also co-edited a number of books, including Romance Revisited (with Lynne Pearce) (1995), Screen Histories: A Screen Reader (with Annette Kuhn) (1998), Thinking Through the Skin (with Sara Ahmed) (2001) and Queer Screens (with Sarah Street) (2007). She is currently completing the final revisions to a monograph for Duke University Press entitled The Cinematic Life of the Gene, one chapter of which focuses on Lynne Hershman Leeson's film about cloning Teknolust.

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