Lynn Hershman Leeson, an 82-year-old artist who was a contemporary of Paik’s, has been working with A.I. technology since the late 1990s and in 1983 made one of the first interactive video art pieces: “Lorna,” created originally for a groundbreaking new technology called laserdisc. Twenty years later, she upgraded to another now-bygone technology — the DVD. Lately, she’s been experimenting with a futuristic method of archiving her work. Looking to preserve a series of videos and documents from her research on genetic manipulation and synthetic biology, she turned to a technology at once far older and more cutting-edge than anything else on the market: DNA. Hershman Leeson first converted her research into a video timeline on Final Cut Pro, and then enlisted Twist Bioscience in San Francisco, which manufactures DNA products, to chemically synthesize it into a sequence. The resulting genetic material is kept in two vials in her studio…
San Francisco Chronicle