Through her long career as a filmmaker and artist, Lynn Hershman Leeson has always embraced the newest of technologies. Yet at no point has this enthusiasm dulled her ability to expose their limits and dangers. Leeson’s telerobotic doll CybeRoberta (1996), one of her best-known works, drew on then-emerging surveillance and hypervisibility tech. With the doll’s eyes doubling as video cameras and webcams, gallery visitors were positioned in limbo, between the observer and the observed. An upcoming survey at the Seoul Museum of Art looks at six decades of Leeson’s cyberfeminist practice, staging a confrontation with the technological developments that both preceded and followed her telerobotic cyborg. This is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Asia; at SeMA, particular attention is given to Leeson’s engagement with digital infrastructure and AI, technologies against which the anxieties of CybeRoberta appear at once prescient and brutally outmoded.—Maja Renfer
San Francisco Chronicle