Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an American multimedia artist and filmmaker. Her work with technology and in media-based practices is credited with helping to legitimize digital art forms. Her interests include feminism, race, surveillance, and artificial intelligence and identity theft through algorithms and data tracking.
Hershman Leeson has been described as a "new media pioneer" for her integration of emerging technologies into her work and is one of five artists that art historian Patrick Frank examines in his 2024 book Art of the 1980s: As If the Digital Mattered.
Early life and education
Lynn Hershman was born in 1941 in Cleveland, Ohio. Her father, who had immigrated to the United States from Montreal, was a pharmacist, and her mother was a biologist. She reports experiencing both physical abuse and sexual abuse during her childhood.In 1963, Hershman graduated with a bachelor's degree in Education, Museum Administration and Fine Arts from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. After graduation, she moved to California intending to study painting and join the student activism at the University of California, Berkeley. She left Berkeley before registering for classes. She later completed a Master of Fine Arts degree from San Francisco State University in 1972. One aspect of Hershman's master's thesis involved writing art criticism under three pseudonyms: Prudence Juris, Herbert Goode and Gay Abandon. She received an honorary Ph.D degree from Pratt Institute in 2023.
Career
Hershman Leeson's work concerns identity, consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, feminism, violence, artificial intelligence and identity theft through algorithms and data tracking, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. Her work grew out of an installation art and performance tradition, with an emphasis on interactivity.Her projects explore technology in digital media and science. Hershman Leeson was the first artist to launch an interactive piece using Videodisc, a precursor to DVD, as well the first artist to incorporate a touch screen interface into her artwork. Her networked robotic art installation is an example of her tendency to expand her artwork beyond the traditional realms of art.
Work by Hershman Leeson is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the William Lehmbruck Museum, the ZKM, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, di Rosa, the Walker Art Center and the University Art Museum, Berkeley, in addition to the private collections of Donald M. Hess and Arturo Schwarz, among many others. Commissions include projects for the Tate Modern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, de Young Museum, Daniel Langlois and Stanford University, and Charles Schwab.
From 1993 to 2004, Hershman Leeson taught in the Art Studio program at the University of California, Davis, where she is currently a professor emerita. She was named chair of the San Francisco Art Institute film department in 2007.
She also served as an A. D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University and was the 2013–2014 Dorothy H. Hirshon "Director in Residence" at The New School.
Work
Early works
Hershman Leeson's earlier works drew interest from themes within science fiction and assemblages of the human body and sexuality. After suffering from cardiomyopathy while pregnant in 1965, Leeson, created her piece Breathing Machine, composed of wax casts of her own face with dyes and assemblages as well as the recordings of her struggled breathing during her illness. The recording includes the voice asking the viewer a series of personal and uncomfortable questions.Her 1968 piece Breathing Machine II is composed of a wax face with a wig and butterflies contained in a wood and plexiglass display, expressing the a dichotomy of life and entrapment within the female body. Shaped by her experiences, Leeson's early works were political in nature and characterized as being closer inspections of femininity and gender roles.
Alter egos
From 1974 until 1978, Hershman Leeson 'developed' a fictional persona and alter ego named "Roberta Breitmore." It consisted not only of a physical self-transformation through make-up, clothing, and wigs, but a fully-fledged personality existing over an extended period of time and whose existence could be proven in the world through physical evidence, such as a driver's license, credit card, and letters from her psychiatrist. Additional evidence of Roberta’s existence included a blood sample, personal newspaper ads, as well as a dental X-ray. Roberta also took part in trends popular for the time, participating in Erhard Seminars Training and enrolling in a Weight Watchers diet program. Through her documentation of Roberta's existence only through records, Hershman Leeson explored the boundaries between reality and constructed identity. Examples include Roberta’s Body Language Chart, in which Hershman Leeson captions Roberta’s body language as behavior similar to female hysteria. An additional example is Roberta’s Construction Chart 1, where Hershman Leeson based her construction of Roberta on instructional magazine ads that informed women on how to beautify themselves.The performance was later taken to further lengths when Hershman Leeson introduced another three 'Robertas', by hiring other performers to enact her character. These 'clones' of Roberta adopted the same look and attire, engaged in some of Roberta's correspondence and also went on some of Roberta dates. Hershman Leeson sought out these Roberta ‘clones’ to prove that her negative experiences as a woman were not exclusive to just her; the other actors playing Roberta ended up shared negative experiences as well, highlighting the misogyny women faced in their daily lives at the time. Towards the end, the 'original' Roberta withdrew from her character leaving the three 'clones' to continue her work, until they were retired in a performance at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, Italy in 1978, during an exorcism at the grave of Lucrezia Borgia. What remains are the physical artefacts of any life: documentation and personal effects such as legal and medical documents and a diary.
Between 1995 and 2000, Roberta transformed into the CybeRoberta, an interactive artificial intelligent sculpture on the web. CybeRoberta was the second of two telerobotic dolls from Hershman Leeson’s series The Dollie Clones, the first being Tillie, The Telerobotic Doll — named after actor Tilda Swinton, who starred in the feature film Conceiving Ada, a film that Hershman Leeson directed. CybeRoberta is a custom-made doll with cameras integrated into its eyes, with one eye streaming a live, in color video feed, while the other captures 320-by-200 pixel black and white photos that are uploaded online every 30 seconds. In-person visitors can also upload images, as well as click an “eyecon” on the doll’s website to turn the doll’s head 180 degrees, allowing it to survey the surrounding area. When both CybeRoberta and Tillie are exhibited together, they also pirate each other's video feeds. In 2006 Roberta Breitmore developed into a character in Second Life. After Stanford University acquired her archive, Leeson worked with Henry Lowood to convert parts of the archive into something for a broader public. They worked to recreate and re-enact both Roberta Breitmore and The Dante Hotel in a virtual space.
''Lorna'' (1983)
Described as the first interactive laser artdisk art project, Hershman Leeson's 1983 work Lorna tells the story of an agoraphobic woman who never left her one-room apartment. As Lorna watched the news and advertisements, watched the news and ads, she became fearful, afraid to leave her tiny room. Viewers were invited to liberate Lorna from her fears, using remote control units, and have the option of directing her life into several possible plots and endings.The plot has multiple variations that can be seen backwards, forwards, at increased or decreased speeds, and from several points of view. There is no hierarchy in the ordering of decisions. And the icons were often made of cut-off and dislocated body parts such as a mouth, or an eye.