Excerpt: Internet_Art – Cyborgs

Read an excerpt from the best-selling book, Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs by Omar Kholeif. Here, in our final instalment, artPost21 readers have been invited to select their favorite 1000-word excerpts from the book. Read on for an insight into cyborgs and the path-breaking work of artist, Lynn Hershman-Leeson.

Image: Lynn Hershman Leeson, CybeRoberta (from Dollie Clone Series, 1995-98). Courtesy the artist, Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco and Bridget Donahue.

Getting to Know You
After our meeting at ICA Boston, I left behind my sweat patches and embarrassment. I became close enough to Leeson to ask personal questions over email. I was surprised when she informed me that my generation was “the only ones to get her work.” I was honored to hear that millennials could be attributed some form of positivity, instead of the term being used as an insult.

To make sense of Leeson’s work, I interviewed her over the years about her life, details of which she volunteered. When I ask Leeson about the genesis of her artwork, Lorna, for instance, she returned to her childhood, issues of class, rural versus urban communities, as well as the personal, situated fear of growing up with anxiety and depression.

Leeson was born in 1941 in Cleveland, Ohio, in what she described to me as a lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood. Her family—two parents, two elder brothers, and her grandmother—was insular. There were no aunts or uncles; they had been left behind in the brutal gas chambers of the Holocaust. That tight household unit was ruptured by domestic violence; Leeson says that she was unable to speak until she was six years old. Solace was found in the local Cleveland Museum of Art and its library, where she was fascinated by a work by Jean Tinguely (1925–1991), Homage to New York (1960), a self-destructing assemblage the artist described as a suicide machine. By the seventh grade, she proclaimed that she was also attending classes at Case Western Reserve University. But the abrupt double-suicide of her friends Micky and Jo, followed by her grandmother’s death, slung her into a “slow, long depression.”

It was in this state that she became fixated on the concept of the cyborg, the notion of a hybrid of human and machine that emerged in 1960. Leeson began experimenting with drawing, sculpture, and performance, creating alter egos—what we would come to refer to today as avatars—as digital stand-ins for the body and as a form of liberation.

Cyborgs
In 1989, Leeson released several path-breaking artworks that she had spent years developing. One of the most haunting of these was the third instalment in her Electronic Diaries (1984–2019) series, entitled First-Person Plural. Leeson addresses her audience in the same manner a celebrity YouTuber would reveal their most intimate obsessions and secrets. She begins, “Sometimes I would pretend I was other people that I had read about.” Her voice is hushed against the clamorous audio backdrop of impending doom reminiscent of a David Cronenberg film. Aspects of her autobiography come to the fore. Leeson speaks of the possibilities of new technologies to enable her to take on multiple personae, to contort oneself through media, to confront or eschew the violence of her own lived experience. The sense of foreshadowing is uncanny. This is social media before such a term had ever been uttered.

Image: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Shadow Stalker (2018-2021). Courtesy the artist, Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco and Bridget Donahue.

Simultaneously, she released her Phantom Limb (1986–89) series of photographs. Posed female bodies disappear and reappear through technological appendages—a face encased in a television screen or a camera, acting as a counter to the dominance of the male gaze articulated by the film theorist Laura Mulvey. These cyborglike creations would form the genesis for a project that started in 1989 and took until 1996 to realize. The artist’s iconic work, CybeRoberta (1994), part of her Dollie Clone (1995–98) series, instantly drew attention from historians of the technological arts. Here, dolls have cameras for eyes, which reflect the contents of a mirror placed in front of them. Leeson describes this as an act of transference, where person and machine become one. The viewer embodies the world of the seemingly inanimate doll, surveilling their surroundings through its eyes. “The audience becomes cyborgs by using the doll’s gaze,” Leeson told me.

It is no surprise that these works dovetailed with the publication of the feminist theoretician Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” in 1985 in Socialist Review. The imaginative paper argues against traditional notions of western patriarchy toward women and for hybrid ways, not only of looking but also of being. It seeks to consider the relationship between humans and machines, specifically in relation to female identity, arguing for new forms of collective imagination by means of a “coalition through affinity.”

Shadow Stalking
I was eager to know more about where Leeson was in 1989 when the net
was seeded, but instead our correspondence veered me to her new work in development Shadow Stalker (2018–21), commissioned and first presented at the Shed in New York in 2019. Shadow Stalker is an immersive installation, film, and website (designed by researcher Francis Tseng) that looks at how algorithms—sets of rules or code that are traditionally fed into computers—were used in a governmental tactic called algorithmic policing or predictive policing. This approach, which came to public attention about 2011, has been used by law-enforcement agencies to predict which zip codes are more likely to be hot spots for crime. The results revealed a world of racial bias and resulted in ongoing police bullying and brutality. Leeson makes the viewer complicit within the drama of her unfolding narrative by capturing their image and displaying their personal information in the gallery. The viewer is exposed but also aware of their safety, because they remain enclosed in the gallery’s controlled spaces.

I showed part of this installation in the exhibition I curated at the Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, Art in the Age of Anxiety, which was set to open in 2020 on the eve of the global pandemic that would be COVID-19. The gallery doors opened and closed as regulations continued to adjust. As 2020 unfolded and visibility grew around the Black Lives Matter movement, and the intentionality of police brutality, Leeson’s work took on new agency. It was a microscope on a global problem, but also an affirmation of what many of us had known all along.

Text courtesy the author and Phaidon Ltd.

Hear Lynn Hershman Leeson on the artPost21’s podcast, Listening with Artists.

Learn more about Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs at www.Phaidon.com/internetart