Though Lynn Hershman Leeson has been creating her unique brand of digital art and work with artificial intelligence for 35 years I first discovered her work with her second feature film, Teknolust. That film featured Tilda Swinton playing four characters, a scientist and her four clones that needed semen to live.
But she has created hundreds of other works, from sculptures using wax and wigs to installations featuring a ballet company painted white to resemble statues to her latest interactive artificial intelligence, DiNa, her robot which embodies the face of Tilda Swinton is showing for the first time in New York.
Check out the website Lynn Hershman Leesons new show
Daniel Robert Epstein: How was it putting together the new show?
Lynn Hershman Leeson: It was fun. It was a reckoning time because Im selling works at a number of galleries including some retrospectives. So this was an overview of a lot of projects with two new pieces but mainly works from the last 30 years have been included. But hopefully it shows some cohesion with what I deal with.
DRE: The press release said it was a rare solo show. Is that true?
LH: I had a show about two years ago and before that I hadnt shown in New York for about nine years. In this case its not an exhibition where theyre just showing their most current work. This was showing an overview and a lot of the pieces havent been shown before. A lot of the pieces are in private collections and cant be shown. But we were able to get things from the past to integrate into this.
DRE: What are the newest works?
LH: Theres DiNa which is the major new piece that just was finished this year.
DRE: How did DiNa come about?
LH: I wanted to make this bot series since 1993 but the technology to make them didnt exist at the time and eventually I wrote Teknolust which was a way of dealing with the creation of autonomous artificial intelligence beings. The original conception was to do two simultaneous things; a distributed movie and then a distributed system for creating one of the characters who lived online. Thats why we had agentruby.com simultaneous to the movie. But they evolved and kept procreating, so Agent Ruby became the grandmother of the current version of DiNa who is much smarter and capable of more things than her grandmother was.
DRE: I loved the website where you could communicate with Agent Ruby, but she didnt like to be cursed at.
LH: Really?
Somebody at Sanford is teaching her German. So she keeps learning. [laughs] But I really wanted to make her something that was keyboard-less and would allow one to talk directly to her using voice, sensors and human responders.
DRE: What did you use to create DiNa that wasnt available years ago?
LH: It was Artificial Intelligence Markup Language in Java and then speech recognition. I have a very good programmer Im working with named Colin Klingman and he was able to get an old program from Open Source that worked better than any of the new systems. Then we used something called Veepers Pulse 3D software, which is a company in San Francisco that gave us their software to work with as an R&D thing. Normally it is a very expensive package but because were in the Bay area we have access to a lot of things that are growing here. Were able to use really cutting edge components and software which arent even on the market yet. When I was conceiving this it, AiML [Advances in Modal Logic] was just being written and when I finished it using a programmer who was based in Iceland, he said I should meet this fellow who was writing this program and lived a few blocks away from me. That was Richard Wallace and he invented Alicebot and thats the core brain that we adapted for these other bots.
DRE: What do the bots do?
LH: They have conversations with you. DiNa can scour the Internet, so essentially shes also a search engine. You can ask her anything thats going on in the world and shell instantaneously be able to get the RSS feeds and talk back to you about what it is youre questioning as well as move it to a meta level of experience. She learns, she grows and she has some emotions and can carry on somewhat of a linear dialogue with you.
DRE: Do they have sexual feelings or anything like that?
LH: They do. Theyre just brains with no bodies but they do have emotions which are tied to feelings of love and attraction. Also sexuality without a body is a little bit different.
DRE: [laughs] Yeah that wouldnt be a lot of fun.
LH: One cant say its not a lot of fun because I would think theyre having fun.
DRE: Youve been doing this art for 35 years, has anything you dealt with years ago come to fruition?
LH: Yeah, all of it has. But when I do it people assume that youre weird or crazy or schizophrenic. It takes 20 or 30 years to get into public consciousness. Fortunately Ive had the 20 to 30 years so that many of my projects became used in world terms and then accessible and then language derived from them. Theres more of a trust now in the work that Im doing than there was when I started. When I started I couldnt get seen because they were completely new genres. People didnt know how to deal with them because they couldnt be categorized. Somebody once said pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their backs. You may be ahead of the group, but there are all kinds of people taking shots at what youre doing.
DRE: How was your work viewed way back when by the art community?
LH: The first work, which I did in 1979 to 1982, was the first interactive computer and it took over 20 years to be seen in galleries. Now its owned by a couple museums. But nobody would show it because they didnt know what it was. I think it showed in some fringe galleries. But people could not classify it so there was no market for it. Its much easier to embrace something that has a historical precedent, like painting.
DRE: What about the science fiction community?
LH: I never thought of it as science fiction. But then later it became categorized as science fiction but most of whats in them is possible.
DRE: Did this come out of a love for science, robotics or out of science fiction?
LH: I dont know but my family is all scientists. My brothers a doctor, my mother was a biologist, my father was a pharmacist, so science was part of the language of thinking when I was growing up.
DRE: What does your family think of your work?
LH: They dont get it [laughs]. Theyre like the art world 20 years ago [laughs]. We kind of avoid the subject. They think its just so out there and weird that they never bring it up [laughs].
DRE: [laughs] These sound like awkward Thanksgivings.
Have you met scientists who have been inspired by your work?
LH: The language of this in the art making world and this as a genre happened since the first work that I did. So certainly the people from Pulse 3-D, the people who invented touch screens, the people who invented hypertext, saw these projects that were finding other ways to communicate. In that sense, there is a community of people who know that their work is being integrated into these projects.
DRE: What happened with the theatrical release of Teknolust?
LH: We were supposed to have a distributor and from our perspective the contract was never met. They didnt promote it or show it in the places that we had hoped that it would be seen. It also seemed to have a demographic where men over a certain age really hated it. Women tended to like it and young people tended to like it but men over a certain age, who tended to be the film critics, didnt get it. David Kehrs review in the New York Times just about killed it. He hated it. He said it was bad old video and that it was this minor sci-fi thing.
I havent been able to make another film since. Though I am making one right now about Steve Kurtz but it is a very tiny film that Im financing basically on my own.
DRE: Would you and Tilda work together again?
LH: Yes. Conceiving Ada and Teknolust are part of a trilogy and Tilda has indicated that she wants to do the third part of the trilogy which is called Undying Love. My focus in the next year is to try to revisit that and find a way to finance the third part of the trilogy.
DRE: What project are you working on now besides the movies?
LH: These bots all have their own individual personalities but when you put them in a group their personalities change and one of becomes aggressive or passive depending on what the situation is. I want to make this terrarium for the bots where theyre in conversation with each other as well as a deviant bot where you can code the deviants into the behavior and then watch the color code as it spreads and morphs through its lineage. Also someone that archives at Stanford University bought my archive and we want to make a meta game based on the original archive that is both an online gaming system as well as existing in a real community that are located through GPS units.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
But she has created hundreds of other works, from sculptures using wax and wigs to installations featuring a ballet company painted white to resemble statues to her latest interactive artificial intelligence, DiNa, her robot which embodies the face of Tilda Swinton is showing for the first time in New York.
Check out the website Lynn Hershman Leesons new show
Daniel Robert Epstein: How was it putting together the new show?
Lynn Hershman Leeson: It was fun. It was a reckoning time because Im selling works at a number of galleries including some retrospectives. So this was an overview of a lot of projects with two new pieces but mainly works from the last 30 years have been included. But hopefully it shows some cohesion with what I deal with.
DRE: The press release said it was a rare solo show. Is that true?
LH: I had a show about two years ago and before that I hadnt shown in New York for about nine years. In this case its not an exhibition where theyre just showing their most current work. This was showing an overview and a lot of the pieces havent been shown before. A lot of the pieces are in private collections and cant be shown. But we were able to get things from the past to integrate into this.
DRE: What are the newest works?
LH: Theres DiNa which is the major new piece that just was finished this year.
DRE: How did DiNa come about?
LH: I wanted to make this bot series since 1993 but the technology to make them didnt exist at the time and eventually I wrote Teknolust which was a way of dealing with the creation of autonomous artificial intelligence beings. The original conception was to do two simultaneous things; a distributed movie and then a distributed system for creating one of the characters who lived online. Thats why we had agentruby.com simultaneous to the movie. But they evolved and kept procreating, so Agent Ruby became the grandmother of the current version of DiNa who is much smarter and capable of more things than her grandmother was.
DRE: I loved the website where you could communicate with Agent Ruby, but she didnt like to be cursed at.
LH: Really?
Somebody at Sanford is teaching her German. So she keeps learning. [laughs] But I really wanted to make her something that was keyboard-less and would allow one to talk directly to her using voice, sensors and human responders.
DRE: What did you use to create DiNa that wasnt available years ago?
LH: It was Artificial Intelligence Markup Language in Java and then speech recognition. I have a very good programmer Im working with named Colin Klingman and he was able to get an old program from Open Source that worked better than any of the new systems. Then we used something called Veepers Pulse 3D software, which is a company in San Francisco that gave us their software to work with as an R&D thing. Normally it is a very expensive package but because were in the Bay area we have access to a lot of things that are growing here. Were able to use really cutting edge components and software which arent even on the market yet. When I was conceiving this it, AiML [Advances in Modal Logic] was just being written and when I finished it using a programmer who was based in Iceland, he said I should meet this fellow who was writing this program and lived a few blocks away from me. That was Richard Wallace and he invented Alicebot and thats the core brain that we adapted for these other bots.
DRE: What do the bots do?
LH: They have conversations with you. DiNa can scour the Internet, so essentially shes also a search engine. You can ask her anything thats going on in the world and shell instantaneously be able to get the RSS feeds and talk back to you about what it is youre questioning as well as move it to a meta level of experience. She learns, she grows and she has some emotions and can carry on somewhat of a linear dialogue with you.
DRE: Do they have sexual feelings or anything like that?
LH: They do. Theyre just brains with no bodies but they do have emotions which are tied to feelings of love and attraction. Also sexuality without a body is a little bit different.
DRE: [laughs] Yeah that wouldnt be a lot of fun.
LH: One cant say its not a lot of fun because I would think theyre having fun.
DRE: Youve been doing this art for 35 years, has anything you dealt with years ago come to fruition?
LH: Yeah, all of it has. But when I do it people assume that youre weird or crazy or schizophrenic. It takes 20 or 30 years to get into public consciousness. Fortunately Ive had the 20 to 30 years so that many of my projects became used in world terms and then accessible and then language derived from them. Theres more of a trust now in the work that Im doing than there was when I started. When I started I couldnt get seen because they were completely new genres. People didnt know how to deal with them because they couldnt be categorized. Somebody once said pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their backs. You may be ahead of the group, but there are all kinds of people taking shots at what youre doing.
DRE: How was your work viewed way back when by the art community?
LH: The first work, which I did in 1979 to 1982, was the first interactive computer and it took over 20 years to be seen in galleries. Now its owned by a couple museums. But nobody would show it because they didnt know what it was. I think it showed in some fringe galleries. But people could not classify it so there was no market for it. Its much easier to embrace something that has a historical precedent, like painting.
DRE: What about the science fiction community?
LH: I never thought of it as science fiction. But then later it became categorized as science fiction but most of whats in them is possible.
DRE: Did this come out of a love for science, robotics or out of science fiction?
LH: I dont know but my family is all scientists. My brothers a doctor, my mother was a biologist, my father was a pharmacist, so science was part of the language of thinking when I was growing up.
DRE: What does your family think of your work?
LH: They dont get it [laughs]. Theyre like the art world 20 years ago [laughs]. We kind of avoid the subject. They think its just so out there and weird that they never bring it up [laughs].
DRE: [laughs] These sound like awkward Thanksgivings.
Have you met scientists who have been inspired by your work?
LH: The language of this in the art making world and this as a genre happened since the first work that I did. So certainly the people from Pulse 3-D, the people who invented touch screens, the people who invented hypertext, saw these projects that were finding other ways to communicate. In that sense, there is a community of people who know that their work is being integrated into these projects.
DRE: What happened with the theatrical release of Teknolust?
LH: We were supposed to have a distributor and from our perspective the contract was never met. They didnt promote it or show it in the places that we had hoped that it would be seen. It also seemed to have a demographic where men over a certain age really hated it. Women tended to like it and young people tended to like it but men over a certain age, who tended to be the film critics, didnt get it. David Kehrs review in the New York Times just about killed it. He hated it. He said it was bad old video and that it was this minor sci-fi thing.
I havent been able to make another film since. Though I am making one right now about Steve Kurtz but it is a very tiny film that Im financing basically on my own.
DRE: Would you and Tilda work together again?
LH: Yes. Conceiving Ada and Teknolust are part of a trilogy and Tilda has indicated that she wants to do the third part of the trilogy which is called Undying Love. My focus in the next year is to try to revisit that and find a way to finance the third part of the trilogy.
DRE: What project are you working on now besides the movies?
LH: These bots all have their own individual personalities but when you put them in a group their personalities change and one of becomes aggressive or passive depending on what the situation is. I want to make this terrarium for the bots where theyre in conversation with each other as well as a deviant bot where you can code the deviants into the behavior and then watch the color code as it spreads and morphs through its lineage. Also someone that archives at Stanford University bought my archive and we want to make a meta game based on the original archive that is both an online gaming system as well as existing in a real community that are located through GPS units.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
kyleomen:
Where can I see this?
anderswolleck:
click the links in the intro