Excerpt

Throughout her career, Lynn Hershman Leeson has charted a course ahead of her time, exploring the fluid nature of identity while navigating its shifts within socio-technical and scientific frameworks. Over the course of six decades, her practice has run the gamut from filmmaking and collective art initiatives to coding her work into strands of DNA. In the process, she has laid the foundations for a generation of artists to challenge algorithmic domination. Since her early firsts — producing an interactive video art disc and artificially intelligent web agent — to her solo exhibition at the New Museum in 2021 and participation in the Venice Biennale 2022, Hershman Leeson’s career has extended the frame of culture across a host of new media. Here, she reflects on a career spent confronting cultural prejudice with Carla Gannis.

Carla Gannis: Your work has forecasted how identity is increasingly fluidized and parsed through digital and social systems. You developed your…