Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Seduction of a Cyborg

Eana Kim: For more than five decades, cyborgs have been a recurring theme throughout your practice. How did you become interested in cyborgs, and how did the narrative of this work come together?

Lynn Hershman Leeson: My interest in cyborgs strangely came when I was in eighth grade. I would often go to the Cleveland Museum of Art and copy things. Once I copied a Leonardo drawing, and thought it was really great. I wanted to preserve it, because I had done it, like Leonardo often did, on material that could not be preserved. I used newsprint. Xerox machines had just come out. They were huge, like half the size of a room. I was able to get permission to make the drawing copy. And after I put it in, there was this churning sound inside. The drawing didn’t come out. I finally had to open the machine and see this thing inside that I pulled out, this rip-torn mess with all this ink all over it. I was devastated, my beautiful drawing had been destroyed. But then when I looked closer, I thought it was better. I realized at that moment, when I was very young, that we have to make a partnership with technology. We needed to work together. That wasn’t directly cyborgs, but it was the first time I felt the importance of working with technology.

Later, I got an opportunity to go to the south of France and work with a new system, which was called high-definition video. That hadn’t existed before. I was very fortunate to go there because they had a lab set up. I saw that with high-definition, it didn’t degrade the way other forms of videos did. While I was there, I only had a week to do something. So, I wrote the narrative. 1994 was when the Internet was becoming prevalent for the first time, and people were spending much more time on their computers. I think that that’s what inspired this project.

Why particularly this theme of seduction and cyborgs?

At that time, the Internet just seemed to be taking over our lives. We were spending more and more time with it and on it. And remember, that was not long after computers became available. I was reading stories like R.U.R, Karel Čapek’s 1921 play about the first robot. I think that all of those things influenced it.

A number of your works explore the relationship between technology and the body, the technological and the biological, and the interface between humans and machines. This work particularly depicts technology as an infectious disease. Were you aiming to depict a dystopian or utopian future in terms of technology?

I think what I was trying to do was depict what we were getting into. And that we should get into it with the knowledge that use this technology comes with a cost. You know, it wasn’t just us as the receiver of all of the information and images and possibilities of the Internet coming to us, but also the fact that we were sacrificing things in order to have that. Our addiction would mean that there was less time for other kinds of things. I had done a series called Phantom Limbs before this, which was really about capture, the capture of women’s bodies by cameras which were very visible. Surveillance was taking place because all we had to do was look around and see where the cameras were. But I don’t think that women particularly knew at that time how much their bodies were being affected by being captured, and then used in so many ways in advertising, and really being exploited.

So, with Phantom Limbs, directly putting machines on women’s bodies, I thought would enable them to understand what was going on with this whole interaction of the process. With Seduction of a Cyborg, the algorithms are invisible. So we’re sacrificing something, but we’re gaining more, and that’s the choice.

Speaking of the invisible algorithm, how do you envision the future relationship between the body and technology in this age of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, and biotechnology?

Well, I think that there are many possibilities to use technology. I mean, certainly, with the invention of CRISPR, the DNA cutting tool where we could regenerate organs; bioprinting, where we can print out our own organs, without a fear of rejection. And interestingly enough, I did a project called The Infinity Engine. Recently, I was looking at what these same scientists were doing who invented CRISPR. And they’re all looking at life extension, and new inventions to make aging a disease.

Technology is neutral. We invent these things, and as humans we give it meaning. So, if humans are utopian, then the technology will be also. And if humans are greedy, and need things, and use it in a negative way, then it’s dystopian, but technology itself depends on what its partner is.