Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work spans installation, performance, photography, video, interactive media, and Net Art, engaging with themes of surveillance, privacy, artificial intelligence, the cyborg, and genetic engineering. In her video works, such as a Seduction of a Cyborg (1994) – in which a blind woman agrees to a treatment that allows her to see images via a computer screen – or Teknolust (2002) – the story of a bio-geneticist who creates three cyborg clones from her own DNA – technology is made complex: it is a tool for control, but also as instrument of empowerment. Hershman Leeson’s mirror-printed series Missing Person presents photographic portraits of people who do not exist. Created using AI technologies, Missing Person, Cyborg (2021) captures a lifelike blonde woman placidly staring at the camera. Faint numbers on the corners of her eyes and hidden and on her neck identify the flaws in the AI system, making obvious the constructed character of her naturalistic features. The video Logic Paralyzes the Heart (2021), narrated by a 61-year-old cyborg, opines on the body’s integration with digital and military-based systems of control. In it, individuals are hauntingly transformed into their data – in the age of surveillance, little more than an analogue for who they are.
Madeline Weisburg
