Performing Presence: From the Live to the Simulated - The Presence Project :: A research project managed by Gabriella Giannachi (Exeter UK) | Nick Kaye (Exeter UK) | Mel Slater (University College London) | Michael Shanks (Stanford USA) :: The Presence Project will be running from October 2005 to June 2009.

What creates a sense of presence? - the presence of a live performer … the presence of the past … in a memory … in ruined remains … the sense of ‘being there’ in an online community … in a VR or mixed reality environment … The Presence Project is exploring such questions with Lynn Hershman Leeson | Gary Hill | Tony Oursler | Blast Theory | The Builders Association | Ken Goldberg | Paul Sermon.

The Presence Project, through the Metamedia Lab, part of Stanford Humanities Lab, is currently creating Life to the Second Power [L2 or Life Squared], an encounter with the archive of Lynn Hershman Leeson in the online world Second Life.

For over three decades, in performance, photography, installations, artificial intelligence agents, artifacts, web presences and in movies, Lynn Hershman’s work has dealt with what it is to live in a world of mediated, surveilled, documented, translated, manipulated, transformed identities, corporealities, and presences. Ninety boxes of the remains of much of this work now lie in an archive in Stanford University - papers, photographs, tapes, movies, sound recordings. Their relationship, as documents, to Lynn’s “body”of work is in question.

Life Squared is a project to rework, to remix part of this archive - the remains of a work set in the Dante Hotel in San Francisco in 1972. In this, Life Squared is an animated archive and a model of the art museum of the future. Life Squared is an experience in an online world, a prosthetic world of avatars, their buildings and goods. It raises all sorts of questions about contemporary experience, real, synthetic, mediated, technology assisted.

What is it to recollect? - in this contemporary world of mediated and multiple presences. And with the prospect of even greater (bio-info-technological) intervention in our sense of self? Will your clone know you? Will your downloaded memories convey the experience of what was? Indeed, with our identities today distributed through all manner of records and documents, our sense of self maintained by all manner of goods, technologies and media, did you ever know who you were?

Follow the development of this collaborative project at [link] and (blog) [link].