Lynn Hershman Leeson

What Happens When an Artist’s Technology Becomes Obsolete?
Category
Article
Date
Oct 17, 2023
Source
The New York Times
Author
Evan Moffitt
Excerpt

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…

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