INTERVIEW

Kristin Lucas

by Marisa Jahn

Inlustration Paulo Mendel

Positioning herself at the centre of her projects, Lucas addresses, with her work, the digital realm, such as its effect on human psychology and regimes of thinking. Reversing the moral imperative to infuse humanity into machines, Lucas maps technological concepts into her life, making evident their presuppositions and flaws. By questioning the construction of the subject through its domination and resistance. Lucas’ work raises questions about the contingency-or ultimate arbitrariness-of identity and its configurability.

On October 5, 2007, Lucas became the most current version of herself when she succeeded in legally changing her name from Kristin Sue Lucas to Kristin Sue Lucas,in a Superior Court of California courtroom. On the name change petition, she entered the word ‘refresh’ as the reason for the change. After a philosophical debate on the perception of change, and a second hearing date, the presiding judge who granted the request said: “So you have changed your name to exactly what it was before in the spirit of refreshing yourself as though you were a web page.”

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MJ: What was life like for you before your court hearing?

KL: As the date of my hearing got closer, the conversations that I had with people became heavy and unsettling. “Will you ‘back up“? How invasive is a government rewrite? Will they wipe the slate clean? Will you remember anything about your former life?” I became overwhelmed. ‘Back up‘? Which format to use? Where to begin? I was working within a narrow time frame, and half of my belongings were in a storage unit on the other coast. l was too disorganized to ‘back up’ in any kind of comprehensive way. Ultimately, I arranged for artist friends and colleagues to produce portraits of me before and after my hearing. These portraits would serve as a time stamped “back up’, regardless of the outcome of the hearing.

MJ: Can you describe what happened in the courtroom?

KL: There was a lot more going on than the transcript conveys. The tension was palpable. My voice was shaky from fear but I was determined; the judge, who had responded with good humour to earlier petitioners. altered his tone when he called me to the stand; he had saved me for last. i read a brief statement of an index card. notes that were jotted in the minutes preceding the hearing. Witnesses in the courtroom seemed to hold their breath in anticipation of the judge’s ruling. His declaration of a two-week recess took us by surprise.

few witnesses approached me after the hearing to shake hands. and offer congratulations on the second hearing date. One witness, present for both hearings (she had incomplete paperwork) smiled and said, “I know how you must feel. I haven’t been myself in over 50 years.” She had succeeded in changing her name back to her maiden name -two weeks before her plan to remarry and take her fiancée’s surname. We stood in line together to purchase copies of our stamped name change decrees. each original copy punctuated with an embossed state seal.

MJ: How did your ‘refresh’ feel?

KL: It felt instantaneous with the judge’s ruling. There was an immediate change. Blood rushed through my body. and I experienced a sense of detachment from everything that had happened before-it was fun. I loved it. I felt different. In that moment I imagined my body being redrawn in space, refilled identically through the process of refreshing, much like the image of being beamed through a transporter on a Star Trek episode, with witnesses present. l had anticipated that my entire field of vision would blip off: death, then blip back on: life. Same information, fresh eyes. There is nothing like facing your own death to make you feel more alive.

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MJ: You’ve used the word ‘versionhood1 to refer to the notion of a multiplicity of the self–the self as iterable. The possibility of ‘versioning’ complicates a unitary and linear sense of the self. and suggests instead a subjectivity that is divisible, and distributed over space and time. Can you elaborate what the concept of ‘versioning’ means to you and your work?

KL: l apply the concept of ‘versioning’ — the perpetual cataloging of revised virtual documents–broadly, to equate this phenomenon with the experience of becoming a version of myself. ‘Versioning’ alleviates the pressures associated with completion by placing focus on process. But it can also lead to feeling insufficient, inadequate, or incomplete. We are reminded multiple times a day about offers to upgrade or update our computers, phones, software, and operating systems-these reminders can lead to a sense of insufficiency. However, in my experience, I have found that life as a ’version’ seems fuller – I feel as if I can define my own boundaries. As Donna Haraway writes:

Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination-in order to act potently.3

MJ: Yes, the analogy between the cyborg’s intimate experience of boundaries relates to your own intuitive relationship to the structures that are entrusted with the power to, as you say, “grant a new lease on life.” How does this cyborgian premise about what is configurable influence other projects or experiences?

KL: At l-Machine Festival in Oldenburg, Germany, earlier this year, I presented myself as a wearable technology. l was biologically born into a body, refreshed within the same body through a process of digital erasure and data entry on a computer. I gave my presentation from the perspective of being both a forty year old (age before the ‘refresh’). and one year old (age after the ‘refresh’).

MJ: In other projects you also, likewise. assume a very humourous approach to investigating the way that spiritual beliefs and notions of subjectivity are put to the test with the advent of new technology. Can you elaborate?

KL: I often create characters that have a clear understanding of their place in the technology/spirituality matrix, but have a difficulty in conveying this clarity to the audience. In Simulcast, practitioners could ‘see‘ the electromagnetic spectrum and adjust it with tinfoil and rituals, but had to resort to clumsy metaphor when describing it to an audience. In the video Involuntary Reception, my character has less control over her abilities, and was as much a victim as a superhero. While she was consumed by her condition, she still struggled to be able to communicate (both figuratively and literally) with the audience.

Like a lot of science fiction. my work tends to assume a position, and I leave it up to the audience to try to piece together what that position really is. I am less interested in the “ghost in the shell” scenario in which machines come alive, or the Al promise that evolution into machines will lead us to immortality. I am far more interested in cyborg spirituality. What happens to our species as technology invades further and further into our core beliefs?

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MJ: We have discussed that it is in fact these delays-or pockets of ‘in-betweenness”-that compose the experience of time in a digital era. You have pointed me towards Sean Cubitt’s writing about the perception of time today:

What then has the digital era brought us? One characteristic experience is render time-seen from the other end of the production process we can call the same phenomenon download time. You build a wireframe, a process, which the verb already describes in terms inherited from the work of traditional modeling with physical materials. You select surfaces and surface effects, try a few options, select a view and render it as a bitmap. Even to load this onscreen can be a time-consuming experience- Happy with the result, you dump the frame, or a sequence based on it, to digital video. You sit back. You make a cup of coffee. You saunter next door and see what they’re up to. You check the render progress. You decide maybe this is a good time to make a few calls, perhaps catch a bite to eat. The hard drive is still whirring when you get back…4

Cubitt also suggests a moral imperative to embrace these moments of “render time” or “download time”:

The delay is itself an integral part of web traffic and file transfer protocol and has been since the early days of mainframe time-sharing- The staggering speeds of even desktop machines and the ubiquitous impression that Moore’s Law is to all intents and purposes a law of physics rather than of economics both lead to the idea that there is a zero of instantaneity toward which we advance by approximation. . . It is always worth savouring time: there is a limited supply in any life. Rendering and downloading are aspects of the time of digital production which are there for contemplation. . . Slowness and its artefacts, like the stagger and jump of downloaded QuickTime movies and RealPlayer files, are not flaws but materials. 5

Your piece Refresh, is predicated on this disparity between the expectation of instantaneity-in both a digital paradigm and the event of changing a name-and the actual lapses that surround the event. What are your thoughts about this? Why is Cubitt’s passage meaningful to you?

KL: A lot of what I was going for in the ‘refresh’ was an expression of the kind of exhaustion that is related to the compression of time and space we experience now. but also feelings of being overwhelmed about abundance and accumulation – so much production. so much excess. so many fragments. It’s exhausting. I see Refresh as a genuine response to the condition of the effect of technology’s influence on space and time, and the sense of overwhelm that it produces.

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MJ: In what ways has your name change influenced aspects of your everyday life or the larger arc of your life?

KL: l deliberately went to court to make a life-altering change that would be outwardly imperceptible yet could create gravitational ripples in its wake. I have a lot of experiences that are uncanny for me.

brada_kristin_3When I submitted my name change petition. l was required to publish a public notice ad in the local paper. A representative from The Oakland Tribute phoned to notify me of the mistake I made in placing the ad. I explained that no mistake had been made; I was in fact pursuing a same name change. She became an ally in this effort. and approved the ad for print.

After the judge agreed to my name change. I went to the Department of Motor Vehicles DMV to get a new driver’s license. When my documents produced error messages –they were rejected by their scanners– l suggested that this may have something to do with my name change. Several clerks and a shift manager inspected my documents and my name change decree a few times; I was met with blank stares. They dismissed this possibility. and apologized for the wait. People working in an official capacity do not always understand what I am asking of them when I hand them a copy of my name change decree. They almost always ask me to explain, and I like involving people in this process.

Also, my mother and I have developed a closer bond because of my ‘refresh’. l hesitated to tell her initially because I thought she might find the news of my second life upsetting. What was wrong with the life she had given me? She asked what she should get me for my July birthday, and that‘s when I broke the news to her, explaining that she should probably get me two birthday gifts from now on –one for my biological birth date, and one for my ‘refresh’ birth date. I was surprised by her reaction; she was thrilled with the realization that we are now both Libras. We have more in common, and this provides a new ground for our relationship.

I celebrated the first year anniversary of my ‘refresh’ in Dallas at a Libra Party, meeting people who shared my new sun sign, and being photographed with them. This year, I will celebrate my second year ‘refresh’ anniversary in Oldenburg at a party that features an Elvis impersonator and karaoke.

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                                                                                                                  So things have definitely changed.

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First “first year portrait” (1968) and second “first year portrait” (2008),

taken on the first year anniversary of Kristin Lucas’ refresh.     [ Photo credit: Michelle Proksell ]

 
 
 
 

1 Regarding versions.   

2 Create versions (in English: versioning).

3 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

 4 Sean Cubitt, “Cybertime: Ontologies of Digital Perception,” Society for Cinema Studies Chicago, March 2000.

 5 Sean Cubitt, “Cybertime: Ontologies of Digital Perception,” Society for Cinema Studies Chicago, March 2000.

 
 
 

Interview originally published by .dpi, an alternative platform for communication, that addresses issues involving women, new media and technological landscapes.