Life Squared

"A poetic allegory about technology's invasion of the body and the destruction of the immune system, witnessing the pollution of history that drowns us." - Video Data Bank

Since its 1988 premiere, this critically acclaimed documentary series has presented hundreds of films that put a human face on contemporary social issues by relating a compelling story in an intimate fashion. "POV" has won virtually every major film and broadcasting award available, including 38 Emmys, 22 Peabody Awards and three Oscars.

Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones.

Emmy Coer, a computer genius, devises a method of communicating with the past by tapping into undying information waves. She manages to reach the world of Ada Lovelace, founder of the idea of a computer language and proponent of the possibilities of the "difference engine." Ada's ideas were stifled and unfulfilled because of the reality of life as a woman in the nineteenth century. Emmy has a plan to defeat death and the past using her own DNA as a communicative agent to the past, bringing Ada to the present. But what are the possible ramifications?

The film examines the case of artist and professor Steve Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). The work of Kurtz and other CAE members dealt with genetically modified food and other issues of science and public policy. After his wife, Hope, died of heart failure, paramedics arrived and became suspicious when they noticed petri dishes and other scientific equipment related to Kurtz's art in his home. They summoned the FBI, who detained Kurtz within hours on suspicion of bioterrorism.

Anxious to use artificial life to improve the world, Rosetta Stone, a bio-geneticist, creates a Recipe for Cyborgs and uses her own DNA in order to breed three Self Replicating Automatons, part human, part computer named Ruby, Olive and Marine.

Through intimate interviews, provocative art, and rare, historical film and video footage, this feature documentary reveals how art addressing political consequences of discrimination and violence, the Feminist Art Revolution radically transformed the art and culture of our times.

"Not only about the cultural differences between America and Denmark, but also about the loss of identity as a result of the ubiquitous surveillance and data systems in the modern world."

Four "seduction ads" placed on cable TV stations invite unexpected responses. This short film is about fantasy and desire in a mediated world.

Shadow Stalker outlines the history of Predictive Policing, Digital Identity Theft and the dangers of Data Mining, that uses algorithms, performance and projections to make visible private Internet systems that are increasingly used by law enforcement and promote racial profiling. Drawing on a network of critical thinkers on surveillance and machine learning, Hershman Leeson abstracts the red square zone into a specter that haunts the work. Where one falls on the map in relation to this red square becomes a proxy for who one is-location, a proxy for identity.

VertiGhost, a newly commissioned work by Lynn Hershman Leeson for the Fine Arts Museums, draws the viewer into a meditation about notions of authenticity and the construction of identity. Inspired by the Legion of Honor’s role as a location for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Hershman Leeson explores the tension at the core of Vertigo between the difficulty or lack of desire to distinguish between reality and fiction versus the pursuit of truth. The eponymous ghost of Hershman Leeson’s project is the elusive nature of a singular identity that haunts the characters in the 1958 film, its most enigmatic representation being the painting of a supposed distant relative of the film’s protagonist Madeleine, around which her character and fate is imagined.

Cyborg #1, a sentient being who adopts the guise of a human through actress Joan Chen, engages in an exercise of self-reflection on her role in history and tells a story: a life, her own, conditioned by the militarized, warmongering context that motivates technological innovation, from encrypted and decrypted underwater communications systems during World War II to the genesis of cyborgs during the Vietnam War.

This docudrama presents the history of the telephone, updated and told from the point of view of a character who uses the screen as both a connection to intimacy and a condom for safe sex.