"The Hotel That Time Built" documents a Stanford Humanites Laboratory (SHL) project called "Life to the Second Power: Animating the Archive," conducted in collaboration with the film and media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose archives are housed at Stanford University, and partially funded by the Daniel Langlois Foundation. The SHL components of the project have taken place under the co-direction of Prof. Michael Shanks and Curator Henry Lowood (yours truly), and the management of Henrik Bennetsen.
This movie was made in Second Life, where the project is also located. It is both a documentary of the work as completed thus far, a demonstration of the project, and an invitation to visit the site.
The project is described as follows on the project wiki :
"Life to the second power" aims to turn the archive of a prominent contemporary artist, Lynn Hershman Leeson, into a new mixed reality and dynamic experience where visitors to an online world can explore the fragmentary remains of past works and co-create new works under an overarching narrative of lost and found identities.
The context for this project is a crucial question of documentation in the contemporary arts and humanities. What comes after works of contemporary art, such as those Lynn has produced, that involve event, installation, performance, and intangible avatars and stories that raise questions about virtuality, cloning, bioethics, artificial intelligence? This question for the digital humanities concerns the archiving of works of art that have no essential material form such as text, image or artifact.
This project will address and answer this question with a new approach to the use of the archives that links insights from new media art, game technology and design, and historical-archaeological research. The usual static notion of "document" is replaced by co-creative remaking." -- HEL