Lynn Hershman Leeson (American, b. 1941)has explored what it means to be a cybernetic organism since the 1960s,working across photography, video, film, performance, installation, and interactive and net-based media.Her practice addresses the ethics and mechanics of identity, drawing on feminist discourses of performance, the body and biotechnology.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio,she lives and works in San Francisco.From 1974 to 1978, she performed as a fictional persona named Roberta Breitmore, who rented an apartment, saw a psychiatrist, attended Weight Watchers meetings, and went on dates arranged through newspaper advertisements.In 1993, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe commissioned her to create Difference Engine #3, a telerobotic installation that streamed live video from its gallery onto the internet. The work won the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in 1999.That technology led to Dollie Clone Series, two telerobotic dolls made between 1995 and 1998, Tillie the Telerobotic Doll and CybeRoberta, fitted with camera eyes that streamed their surroundings onto the internet.,CybeRoberta reworked the Roberta Breitmore persona as a device that intercepted Tillie's video feed.
In Lorna (1979-1984), an interactive video installation, viewers used a remote control to guide a housebound character through choices leading to one of three endings: death, escape or the destruction of her television.The Phantom Limb photographs (1985-1988) merge images of the female body with sockets, wires, cameras and television screens.,Her feature film Conceiving Ada stars Tilda Swinton as the mathematician Ada Lovelace.,Her documentary !W.A.R. Women Art Revolution, released in 2012, draws on interviews she filmed between 1968 and 2011 with women artists, curators, critics and historians, tracing the feminist art movement.
Since 2014, Hershman Leeson has worked with scientists on The Infinity Engine, a body of work exploring DNA-based data storage and genetic engineering.Shadow Stalker (2019) addresses Predpol, a policing tool that sorts individuals into racial categories, questioning the trust placed in such technological systems.Her first museum retrospective, “Civic Radar”, opened at ZKM Karlsruhe in 2014.A retrospective surveying six decades of her career, “Twisted”, was shown at the New Museum in New York in 2021.In 2021, Hershman Leeson released The Redeeming Gift of Humanity on the SuperRare platform, a video built from footage of Swinton in Conceiving Ada predicting that humans would recreate themselves.Two years later, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired its first NFT through a donation from Hershman Leeson, a clip from Conceiving Ada titled Final Transformation #2.
