Lynn Hershman Leeson

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Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. in 1941 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American artist and filmmaker. She was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She is Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in a era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds.

Contents 1 Work 2 Awards and honors 3 Selected Filmography 4 Other Works 4.1 Early Works 4.2 Performances/Installations 4.3 Photography 4.4 Video 4.5 Net Works 5 Awards 6 References 7 External links

Work

Leeson's work has as its themes: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds.

In 2007 a retrospective at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, Autonomous Agents, featured a comprehensive range of the artist's work - from the Roberta Breitmore series (1974-78) to videos from the 1980s and interactive installations that use the Internet and artificial intelligence software. Her influential early ventures into performance and photography are also featured in the current touring exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I, was published by The University of California Press in 2005 on the occasion of another retrospective at the Henry Gallery in Seattle.

Work by Lynn Hershman Leeson is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the William Lehmbruck Museum, the ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Walker Art Center and the University Art Museum, Berkeley, in addition to the private collections of Donald 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.

Her three feature films - Strange Culture, Teknolust, Conceiving Ada - have been part of the Sundance Film Festival and The Berlin International Film Festival, among others, and have won numerous awards. She is presently in the editing phase of a feature-length documentary entitled !Women Art Revolution! A (Formerly) Secret History, which is anticipated for release in 2010.

Awards and honors

Recently honored with grants from Creative Capital and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is also the recipient of a Siemens International Media Arts Award, the Flintridge Foundation Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts, Prix Ars Electronica, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize, and the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art from the Association for Computer Graphic's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH). In 2004, Stanford University Libraries acquired Hershman Leeson's working archive.

Lynn Hershman Leeson was the recipient of a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

Hershman Leeson is Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis and an A D White Professor at Large at Cornell University. ^{[1] [2]}

Selected Filmography

• Conceiving Ada (1997)
• Teknolust (2002)
• Strange Culture (2007)
• !Women Art Revolution! A (Formerly) Secret History (Anticipated 2010)

Other Works

Early Works

• Drawings, Collages, Paintings (1958-72)

  Investigation: The integration of humans and machines in line drawings, watercolor, and collage

• Sculptures (1963-74)

  Investigation: Recyclable modular human body casts with recyclable materials

Performances/Installations

• Prudence Juris, Herbert Goode, Gay Abandon (1968-72)

  Investigation: The effect of three simulated art critics on public opinion

• Performance Dinners (1970-83)

  Investigation: Site-specific consumable dinner portraits/performances

• The Dante Hotel (1973-4)

  Investigation: A simulated hotel room, in real life and real time, that reconstructs fictional occupants through fragments of their identity

• Roberta Breitmore (1974-1978)

  Investigation: A simulated person who interacts with real life in real time

• Forming a Sculpture Drama in Manhattan (1974)

  Investigation: Three simultaneous, dispersed site-specific installations with intertwined narratives

• The Floating Museum (1974-1978)

  Investigation: Organization to commission and exhibit public, site-specific, and non-traditional art forms

• Lady Luck: A Double Portrait of Las Vegas (1975)

  Investigation: The American mythology of chance and luck

• RE:Forming Familiar Environments (1975)

  Investigation: Construction of social relationships by means of a live interactive game set in a private home

• 25 Windows: A Portrait of Bonwit Teller (1976)

  Investigation: Department store windows as a cultural portrait

• MAMCO: Myth America Corporation (1979-80)

  Investigation: A simulated corporate structure to finance artwork

• Non Credited Americans (1981)

  Investigation: The dichotomy of credit and non-credit within a consumer structure

• New Acquisitions (1985)

  Investigation: A simulated museum acquisition of Greek sculptures as a site-specific public performance

Photography

• Face Stamps (1966-72)

  Investigation: How the state controls and alters individual identity

• Water Women Series (1975-)

  Investigation: 'Bodies of water' that reflect invisibility, evaporation, and survival

• Hero Sandwich Series (1980-87)

  Investigation: genetically motivated photography

• Time Frame Series (1984)

  Investigation: A manipulation of media to mask and to celebrate corporeal vulnerability

• Phantom Limb Series (1988-)

  Investigation: Embodied identity in a culture of mass media and surveillance

• Digital Venus Series (1995-)

  Investigation: The disembodiment of the female nude in art history

• Cyborg Series (1997-)

  Investigation: The seduction of cyborgian subjectivity

Video

• Fifty-three videos, various lengths

  Investigation: Video as alternative space

• Interactivity
• Lorna (1983-84)

  Investigation: Self-referencing games; an interactive branching system of multiple narratives and points of view

• Deep Contact (1984-89)

  Investigation: An interactive touch-sensitive videodisc about the relationship of intimacy to technology

• Room of One's Own (1990-3)

  Investigation: A reverse peep show in which the viewer's 'gaze' both determines the narrative and captured in the act of surveillance

• America's Finest (1994-5)

  Investigation: A camera/gun that transforms the aggressor/user into a victim of surveillance and capture

• Paranoid Mirror (1995-6)

  Investigation: A sensor-driven environment that transforms the user into the interface

• Camera Obscura (1998)

  Investigation: Real-time digital inverse capture becomes a reverse surveillance system

Net Works

• The Dollie Clones (1995-8)

  Investigation: Two telerobotic humanoids that absorb viewers into their internal networks

• The Difference Engine #3 (1995-8)

  Investigation: A networked telerobotic sculpture using the physical and virtual architecture the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie

• Time and Time Again (1999)

  Investigation:A distributed network that integrates viewers in scattered locations into a sensor-driven museum environment

• Synthia Stock Ticker (2000-2)

  Investigation: How changes in the stock market reflect and affect human behavior

• Agent Ruby (2002-)

  Investigation: An artificial intelligence agent with the capacity to develop her memory and knowledge base by interacting with users

• DiNA (2004-)

  Investigation: A networked, artificially intelligent bot running for the political office ^[3]

Awards

• 2009

Lifetime Achievement Award, Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH), New Orleans, LA

Guggenheim Fellow, US & Canada Competition. Creative Arts, Film, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, NY

Individual Artist Commissions Award, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco, CA

• 2008

Film/Video Grantee, for !Women Art Revolution! A (Formerly) Secret History, Creative Capital, New York, NY

• 2007

Marlon Riggs Award, for courage and innovation in cinema, The San Francisco Film Critics Circle, San Francisco, CA

• 2006

Innovation that Matters Award, ISEA/ZeroOne, San Jose, CA

Funding, for the production of Life to the Second Power: Animating the Archive, The Daniel Langlois Foundation, Montreal, Canada^[4]

• 2005

National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Media Arts

Positive Innovations Award, International Digital Media and Arts Association, Muncie, IN

Acquisition of Lynn Hershman Leeson archives 1966-2002 by Stanford University Libraries

• 2003

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize in Science and Technology, for Teknolust, Hamptons International Film Festival, East Hampton, NY

• 2000

Cyber Identities, Tribute and Retrospective, Feminale Film Festival, Cologne, Germany

Funding, for the production of Agent Ruby, The Daniel Langlois Foundation, Montreal, Canada^[5]

• 1999

[[Golden Nica Award}} (Grand Prize) in Interactive Art, for The Difference Engine #3, Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria

• 1995

Anne Gerber Award, for Paranoid Mirror, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA

ZKM/Siemens Media Art Prize, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany

Cyberstar Award, for The Venus Home Page, WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk)/GMD, Cologne, Germany

Honorary Mention in Interactive Art, for America's Finest, Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria

• 1994

Reaching through the Screen: A Tribute to Lynn Hershman, Special Tribute, San Francisco International Film Festival, San Francisco, CA

• 1993

Honorary Mention in Interactive Art, for Room of One's Own, Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria

• 1991

Barbara Aronofsky Latham Memorial Award, for Conspiracy of Silence, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Jonas Mekas Award, for Shadow's Song, Humboldt International Short Film Festival, Arcata, CA

First Prize, for Seeing Is Believing, Festival Internacional de Video Cidade de Vigo, Vigo, Spain

• 1990

Trophée de Cristal (Grand Prize), for Longshot, Montbéliard Video and Television Festival, Montbéliard, France

Prix du Public, for Longshot, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Montréal, Canada

• 1989

Film of the Year, for Longshot, London Film Festival, British Film Institute, London, England

• 1987

Golden Gate Award, for Confessions of a Chameleon, San Francisco International Film Festival, San Francisco, CA

References

1. ^ "Lynn Hershman Leeson bio/cv". bitforms gallery, New York, NY. 2009. http://www.bitforms.com/images/pdf/biocv/hershman_bio.pdf. 
2. ^ "Lynn Hershman Leeson at Gallery Paule Anglim". Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA. 2009. http://www.gallerypauleanglim.com/Gallery_Paule_Anglim/Lynn_Hershman_Leeson_Biography.html. 
3. ^ "The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson". 2009. http://lynnhershman.com. 
4. ^ Jacques Perron (2006). "Life to the Second Power: Animating the Archive". Daniel Langlois Foundation. http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1829. Retrieved October 5, 2006. 
5. ^ Jacques Perron (2004). "Agent Ruby". Daniel Langlois Foundation. http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=167. Retrieved October 5, 2006. 

External links

• Lynn Hershman Leeson Home page
• Lynn Hershman Leeson Weblog
• Lynn Hershman Leeson Gallery