Hershman Leeson began working with concepts around cyborgs as early as 1962 (we could say planting a fertile seed for Donna Haraway’s 1975 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’). In the 1990s, she started working with the themes of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. A time when it became evident that it was no longer necessary to have a physical body to adopt a fictitious identity in the global network. She coined the term “anti-body” to refer to her research and work on virtual identity in cyberspace. She saw her “anti-body” (or alter-ego) as a viral presence that manifests itself in artificial intelligence fictitious forms, such as the online personas Agent Ruby and DiNA, roaming of the Internet and morphing to survive. As she explains: anti-bodies identify, expose and transform toxins in culture. These same issues have permeated my work for the past 50 years…
Blake Gopnik On Art