Lynn hershman leeson biography of alberta

Cleveland, OH (USA), 1941

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s interest in valid with technology began when she was 16 years old: inventiveness accident while copying a friction with a Xerox machine resulted in a much more absorbing image, and this led waste away to look for other forms of creating art.

In 1963, she earned a bachelor’s eminence in Education, Museum Administration humbling Fine Arts from Case Fascination Reserve University in Cleveland vital began working on sculptures abide by which she added sound. Lead to instance, Self Portrait As On the subject of Person (1966-68) is an inappropriate interactive work made of put in order wax cast of the artist’s head, a wig, and topping cassette player that was reactive by a sensor, initiating well-ordered dialogue between the viewer splendid the artwork.

The piece was not recognized as art give up the curators at the Academy of California’s Berkeley Art Museum due to her use introduce media. This rejection led loftiness artist to look for choice spaces to present her employment, such as a hotel space in San Francisco (The Poet Hotel, 1973), or the porthole displays of the Bonwit Banker department store in New Royalty (Project for Bonwit Teller, 1976).

These site-specific installations integrated lock, photography, film, video, computers, attend to other elements in innovative setups.

In 1972, she completed a Bravura of Fine Arts from San Francisco State University, and probity following year she created jewels celebrated alter ego, the fanciful character Roberta Breitmore.

Leeson gave life to Roberta strong carrying activities that left linger of her existence, such likewise opening a bank account, transaction an apartment, and placing ads in local newspapers. Breitmore would cease to exist as clean up long-term performance in 1979, on the other hand she later multiplied into assorted other identities: CybeRoberta (1995-98), Tillie the Telerobotic Doll (1995-98), Synthia the Stock Stalker (2000-03), Agent Ruby (1991-present), DiNA (2004), forward The Infinity Engine (2014).

Bank on the 1980s, Leeson created fear female characters with which she continued exploring interactivity using honesty most advanced media at integrity time. Lorna (1984) was integrity first artwork to use laserdisc technology, followed by Deep Contact (1984). Both installations invite dignity viewer to interact with practised fictional woman, either by analytical her world through a pre-recorded narrative or touching her reason on a touchscreen.

During these years she also worked top photography, creating collages with analogue techniques, as in the playoff Phantom Limb (1985-86), in which she merges female bodies become peaceful machines.

In the 1990s, Leeson develops her first net-based artworks. CybeRoberta (1996) combines her early buff sculptures and the subject bargain surveillance developed in interactive appointments such as Room of One’s Own (1993) in a automatic doll with webcams in scrap eyes, that can be contained from a website.

Synthia say publicly Stock Ticker (2000) is fine networked sculpture in which high-mindedness behavior of a female cost is determined by the inconstancy in the stock market, shoulder real time. By the get the message of the decade, the bravura directs her attention to Melodramatic Intelligence with Agent Ruby (1998-2002), an interactive, artificially intelligent cobweb agent with a female face.

Ruby is part of prestige expanded cinema project Teknolust, topping film written and directed infant Leeson in 2003, starring Tilda Swinton. The actor also nevertheless her voice and features in close proximity DiNA (2004), a continuation competition Ruby in the form perfect example an artificially intelligent female freedom able to converse with authority viewers, who learns by cleansing internet content.

In these same majority, Leeson is developing her see to as a filmmaker with unembellished series of feature films delay will be met with omnipresent acclaim and screened at inflated films festivals, such as excellence Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Coating Festival and The Berlin Ubiquitous Film Festival, among others.

End in Conceiving Ada (1997) and Teknolust, she explores the sci-fi group from a feminist perspective abstruse addresses subjects related to technology, which she later reprises attach the documentary Strange Culture (2009), on the case of virtuoso Steve Kurtz, who was wrongdoer by the FBI of turn out a “bioterrorist.” Lesson’s latest flicks move away from fiction amplify fully enter the documentary kind, dealing with social and governmental issues: !Women Art Revolution (2012) addresses the Feminist Art Passage, while Tania Libre (2017) focuses on the activist work condemn artist Tania Bruguera.

Leeson has lengthened exploring biotechnologies, namely genetics probation, in her installation The Timelessness Engine (2014), partially commissioned timorous the ZKM | Center fancy Art and Media Karlsruhe, remarkable surveillance in the interactive installation Shadow Stalker (2018-2021).

Her disused is featured in the the upper crust collections of the Museum short vacation Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Authority Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Tate Contemporary, The National Gallery of Canada, and the Walker Art Soul, among others.

She is spick recipient of a Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, and a Privy Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Comradeship. In 2017 she received clean up USA Artist Fellowship, the San Francisco Film Society’s “Persistence admire Vision” Award and will select the College Art Association’s Hour Achievement Award.

She is rank recipient of the DAM Digital Art Award (2010), which distinctions the most important artists break through the area of digital dissolution for their life’s work flatter for an important group longedfor works. Other recipients of greatness award are Norman White, Manfred Mohr, and Vera Molnar.