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Sundance Movie Première in a virtual world

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Strange Culture - actors Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan

On Monday 22 January and Wednesday 24 January 2007 SHL's experimental facility in the online "virtual" world Second Life will host the première of Lynn Hershman's new movie "Strange Culture" as part of the Sundance Film Festival.

In 2004 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.

We have chosen to screen the movie on our island in Second Life (home of our LifeSquared project with Lynn Hershman - [link]), because the Presence Project is committed to exploring the intersections of the arts, humanities, science and technology, reaching out beyond the academy to address such matters of common concern.

Guests will include Lynn Hershman, Steven Kurtz and Howard Rheingold.

http://festival.sundance.org/filmguide/popup.aspx?film=7546

Reviews of the film are at:

Variety review [link]

Hollywood Reporter review [link]

Film threat review [link]


On January 22nd Gabriella Giannachi attended the special Sundance@Second Life screening of Lynn Hershman Leeson's latest film Strange Culture. When I arrived, Henrik Bennetsen (Lys Ware) from SHL was standing on stage, ensuring everything was ready for this extra-ordinary screening. The audience was strangely quiet, perhaps in ore of the event through which such different and far apart audiences were for the first time brought together in Second Life in real time.

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As I was waiting, looking around, waiting again, I suddenly realised that I was right next to Howard Rheingold, one of the theorists who has most profoundly inspired my latest book, The Politics of New Media Theatre. Totally unused at making meaningful conversation in Second Life, but, strangely, somehow trusting that the person next to me definitively was Rheingold, I said something like 'I really love your books!', to which the slightly eccentric-looking man in the boater politely replied 'Thank you'.

I also saw Archaeolog Ware again, who looked very elegant. So, I said 'Nice suit!' and he replied 'Of course!'

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During the screening of the film I kept on trying to compare my previous viewing of it, through DVD, on my computer, with this, also on my computer, but re-mediated, as Bolter and Grusin probably would have put it, in Second Life.

I still felt close to the plot, but less inclined to be immersed in it. I guess I was more immersed in Second Life than in the film. The audience however was strangely quiet. The film clearly had a profoud impact and absorbed them sufficiently to keep them active for the entire duration of the film.

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When Steve Kurtz and Tilda Swinton appeared on the screen, I perceived an uncanny sensation of their presence within my own space-time. I was watching a real person, speaking as if in a documentary, in a film, in which this person was also present as character, sitting in a vr environment as my avatar, surrounded by other avatars that were in different time zones and continents. And yet, despite the intermediated and auractic distance, I, who of course have met Steve, and so also have a memory of him as a person, perceived his actual presence right there, right in front of me.

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After the screening Steve, in particular, but also Lynn answered questions from the audience at Sundance as well as the one in Second Life. I realised at that stage that most members of the Second Life audience were in fact journalists, or academics, like myself. Steve, as always, got much support - some interesting questions, some strange questions, and I wonder just now how it felt for him to answer the Second Life questions and whether ultimately not knowing who was asking the questions felt invasive within this context.

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Page last modified by gabriella giannachi Fri Jan 26/2007 03:54
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