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Lynn Hershman

1. Lynn Hershman was born in 1941 in Cleveland. She attended Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1963. She got her bachelors degree in Education, Museum Administration, and Fine Arts. She then continued to get a Masters in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University in 1972.

She focuses her work on “identity, reality, and truth�. Fiction to reality, similar to masquerades. She also focuses her work on conceptual issues of gender and technology. Even though her artistic background includes many fine art mediums, her main focus is in computer-bases installations, which include telepresence, telematics, and telerobotics.
2. Lynn Hershman began her interactive art in the early 1980s with a piece named Lorna. This piece is an interactive video, which allows one to view Lorna in a "semi-normal" room setting. Objects are numbered and thus referencing different chapters in her life. We are intrigued by these objects and become a part of the interaction with Lorna. Hershman continues this feeling in 1989 with her piece called Deep Contact. She utilizes technology and uses a touch screen for the viewer/participants. Upon initial interaction with the work one is able to read a statement which gives directions on what parts of the work you can interact with and what to expect.
Hershman divides her work into two categories. B.C (before computers) and A.D (after digital). She made a statement on her website which explains she uses the speeches of heroes and radicals that influenced our society. She wanted “an eventual media through which small voices could be reborn into alternative identities that could reflect into the culture.� A.D refers cyberspace as medium in which one can create a personal mask of sorts. She explains it as the syntax of the culture of computer mediated identity, a culture that can also include simultaneous multiple identities that abridge or dislocate real time gender and age.�
3. Lynn Hershman had a huge impact on the art world through her digital interactive art. She emphasized things like physical reflections in the sense that she used monitors or surveillance devices to reflect on us either in the physical sense or the emotional sense. Seeing ourselves through a virtual medium we are able to live along with the artwork. This is also displayed with her Telerbotic Doll from 1998 named Tillie.
4. Because this is such a new and innovative medium, I believe that Hershman chose to work within the telepresence in order to make a bolder statement and emphasize criticism amongst taboo topics. By making robotics in general challenges the viewer to think beyond the aesthetic and dive into the emotional because they can see themselves with the artwork because of the interactive quality.

Both Lynn Hershman and Adrianne Wortzle explore technology and utilize it in a way which enhances the entire viewing of the piece. The viewer is not only just a spectator but a participant within the work. Both artists worked in this medium because of its new and innovative style. They both live in an era where it helps their work get noticed if there is a new and exciting method. Telepresence interacts with the viewer on an emotional and psychological level which elevates their work and their purpose. It seems that Lynn focuses her work on more taboo and more severe topics than adrianne. Their styles as a whole however, seem to mimic each other in the fact that they incorporate robotics and the viewer and hold significance to both of those parts equally.

Lynn Hershman's Work
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