STANFORD LIBRARIES ACQUIRE ARCHIVE OF SAN FRANCISCO AVANT-GARDE ARTIST
The Stanford University Libraries have acquired the working archive of Lynn Hershman, an artist and film maker who pioneered in the use of interactive computer and video technology to advance ideas about personal identity, consumerism, the effects of mass media on society, and humans’ relationships to machines. The archive contains material related to all stages of Hershman’s completed projects since the early 1970s, including preliminary conceptual research and drawings, technical specifications, media, correspondence, and photographs.
“I can think of few artist’s archives that are better suited to this institution than Hershman’s,” commented Prof. Pamela Lee, the Art & Art History Department’s contemporary art specialist. “She is one of the most important figures to emerge from the Bay Area art scene in the last thirty- five years; she is internationally acclaimed as seminal in the domains of performance, new media and feminist art. Her work is pioneering in its exploration of issues that are now recognized as central to the workings of contemporary culture.”
In a performance art project, called Roberta Breitmore, that Hershman developed from 1972-79, she constructed a fictional persona who lived in real time. As Hershman recounts in Private I, Secret Agents, a book on her art to be published by UC Press in 2005, “Roberta saw a psychiatrist, used a specific language, had unique handwriting, and secured credit cards, a checking account, and a driver’s license…. Roberta lived through twenty-seven independent adventures, the most dangerous of which was being recruited for a prostitution ring.”
In The Dante Hotel (1973-74), Hershman assembled the “belongings” of an imaginary person in a San Francisco transient hotel, in effect creating the simulacrum of a fictitious life. Twenty-five Windows (1974-76) was an installation that used a large number of Bonwit Teller’s display windows in New York to create a visual narrative.
Hershman was the Associate Project Director for Christo’s Running Fence from 1972-76.
In the late 1970s Hershman was experimenting with the incorporation of laser and
computer technology into her art. Among the first results were Lorna (1979-83), an interactive laser disk (usually considered the first interactive video art installation) that tells the story of an agoraphobic, indecisive woman, whom the screen shows sitting in her apartment watching television and clicking her remote. The viewer, by using a similar remote to select objects shown in Lorna’s apartment, could direct her life into a choice of several different plots and endings. Hershman’s use of this device anticipated by a decade the navigational structures presented by 1990s branching-narrative CD-ROMs.
“Lynn Hershman envisioned, thought out, and realized just about everything about interactive narrative that is going on now, well in advance of its officially acknowledged gurus,” said Prof. Paul DeMarinis of the Art & Art History Department. “For this reason alone, the archive will be of value to present and future scholars of interactive media. Beyond that, though, is the fact that as well as being a visionary and innovator,
Hershman is a really good artist. Several of her works are considered to be true masterpieces, and any insights into her working process during that period will be of interest to scholars, artists and collectors for a long time to come.”
From the mid-1980s to the mid-’90s, Hershman used interactive videodisk technology for several important projects that each brought the viewer into a position that encouraged a close examination of his own motives and behavior. Deep Contact (1984-89) invited participants to touch Marion, their “guide” on any part of her body via a Microtouch monitor. Certain interactive sequences developed depending on what part of her body was touched. Room of One’s Own (1990-93), an interactive computer-based videodisk installation, was an electronic peepshow that turned the tables on the viewer, suddenly making him the object of scrutiny and criticism voiced by “Marion,” the protagonist from Deep Contact. America’s Finest (1993-95) investigated the relationship between the camera and the gun over the past century, with concepts such as “capture,” “surveillance,” and “shooting” forming the links between the two. In the interactive installation, when a viewer squeezed the trigger of an M16 rifle, his image appeared on a screen in the rifle’s sights and then faded into other scenes.
Synthia Stock Ticker (2000-02) was a “networked sculpture” that communicated the changing online patterns of the stock market in real time. Instead of ticker tape, the miniaturized stock ticker housed a small monitor that reflected the environment of a female character named Synthia, who personified and symbolized the market by reacting in real time to changing stock data. For example, if the market was hot, she literally caught fire, did backflips, or shopped at Christian Dior. If the market was down, she chain-smoked, had nightmares, or shopped at Goodwill.
Hershman also completed 53 videotapes between 1977 and 1996, ranging from the 75-minute First Person Plural (1984-96), in which a woman’s personal life develops over 12 years and is seen against a backdrop of the history of the world during the same period, to the six-minute-long Seduction of a Cyborg (1994), a poetic metaphor for how technology infects the human body.
Hershman wrote, directed and produced her first feature-length film, Conceiving Ada, between 1995 and 1997. It treats themes of love, sex, artificial life, computers, DNA transference, history, and memory. Tilda Swinton plays the brilliant mathematician Ada Byron King, the daughter of Lord Byron, who is credited with writing the first computer program.
Teknolust (1999-2002), Hershman’s second feature film, is an investigation of cyber identity, cloning, and the future of hybrid replicants and artificial life. In it, Tilda Swinton plays a biogeneticist named Rosetta Stone who, eager to use artificially intelligent robots to improve the world, devises a formula through which she can download her own DNA into her computer. All of the characters in the film struggle to find meaning in a world where love is the only thing that establishes reality. In the process, they find harmony between the real and the virtual world.
“Teknolust,” according to Hershman, “is a coming-of-age story, not only for the characters but also for our society’s relationship to technology.”
A modest endowment will be established, the income from which will be used to provide travel support for scholars visiting Stanford to work with the archive.