Lynn Hershman

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Lynn Hershman
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Lynn Hershman
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In Lynns Words
Ive been obsessed with counterfeit
representations of life. I made drawings,
paintings, sculptures and photocopied images
about the integration of humans and machines
which can result in what I term techno-human
identity. I have worked in photography, video,
installation and interactive and online art. My
fifty-three videos and seven interactive
installations have won many international
awards. My body of work addresses the social
construction of female identity and related
issues of social conditioning, most often through
the narrative construct of an alter ego or
"agent." I have always been attracted to digital
tools and cinematic metaphors that reflect our
time, such as privacy in an era of surveillance,
personal identity in a time of pervasive
manipulation, and finally, have a passion to
pursue ideas of identity, memory, history,
fiction-fact, and gender issues that are released
by forms and genres represented by digital
technology and on reflection, perhaps glimpse
into the mirror of our culture.
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How to succeed in Art

• As part of her master's thesis at San Francisco
  State, the Cleveland-bred artist invented three
  phantom art critics -- each with his or her own
  style theoretically based on famous critics like
  Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg -- hustled
  freelance writing jobs for them and wrote dueling
  reviews of Lynn Hershman's sculpture. Those
  critiques helped her land gallery exhibitions --
  before that, she said, "Nobody would see me, I
  would get brushed off".

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Lynn Has Been Busy
Exhibition History Lynn Hershman has worked in
film, photography, video, installation,
interactive and net based works. She has had over
200 exhibitions internationally, completed 53
videotapes, 8 interactive installations, 3 web
based installations and two feature films and
edited the book "Clicking In". She was given the
ZKM Media Arts Award was a Flintridge Fellow for
Lifetime Achievements in the Visual Arts,
received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination,
Received in 1999 the Golden Nica for interactive
arts at Ars Electronica, and in 2003, received an
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation award for her film
Teknolust. She has had retrospectives at the
National Gallery of Canada, ICA and will have a
retrospective organized by the Henry Gallery in
Seattle that will tour the U.S., Canada and
Europe beginning 2005. A monograph of her work is
scheduled for release in 2005 by the University
of California Press. She is a professor at the
University of California, Davis. Her work is in
the collections of Donald Hess, Arturo Schwarz,
The Museum of Modern art, The William Lehmbruch
Museum, the ZKM , the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, The National Gallery of Canada and others.
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Photography
http//www.kochgallery.com/artists/contemporary/He
rshman/
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Film
Conceiving Ada (1997) Emmy Coer, a computer
genius, devises a method of communicating with
the past by tapping into undying information
waves. She manages to reach the world of Ada
Lovelace, founder of the idea of a computer
language and proponent of the possibilities of
the "difference engine." Ada's ideas were
stifled and unfulfilled because of the reality of
life as a woman in the nineteenth century. Emmy
has a plan to defeat death and the past using her
own DNA as a communicative agent to the past,
bringing Ada to the present. But what are the
possible ramifications?
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Film
Teknolust (2002) Anxious to use artificial life
to improve the world, Rosetta Stone, (Tilda
Swinton), a bio-geneticist creates a Recipe for
Cyborgs and uses her own DNA in order to breed
three Self Replicating Automatons, part human,
part computer named Ruby, Olive and Marine. The
SRA's act as 'portals' on the internet, helping
users to fulfill their dreams. The SRA's are
nourished through touch. Because they were bred
only with Rosetta's DNA, they need the balance of
an X chromo or male sperm to survive. Ruby
falls in love and becomes impregnated by Sandy, a
xerox shop worker. The characters struggle to
find love in a world that no longer needs sex to
reproduce, a world that is changing and is
populated with people who use provisional
identities and are seen through virtual selves
and a world where love is the only thing that
makes things real.
http//www.agentruby.com/indexflash.html
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Lynn says
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http//www.lynnhershman.com