Another one to look out for is the legendary new media art pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson, who made what is regarded by some as the first ever media work in 1966, by incorporating sound into her work. “Nobody had ever done that, and consequently, I was told for years it wasn’t art and nobody would show it,” the 81-year-old artist told Artnet News. Leeson also began building an artificial intelligence, Agent Ruby, in 1998 as part of her practice of expanded cinema. The A.I. was a stand-in for a cyborg character who had a lonely hearts column on the internet in her film Technolust. In Venice, Leeson is showing a film called Logic Paralyzes the Heart, about a 61-year-old cyborg played by the Chinese-American actress Joan Chen, who goes on a retreat to find ways to become more human. It will be installed in a room wallpapered with AI-generated faces of people who don’t exist.
Artsy