An Overview of my Work
LYNN HERSHMAN

Whenever I am fortunate enough to be asked to give a presentation, I think back to the wisdom of Marcel Duchamp who once said: If we are lucky in our lifetime, we will have 3 ideas. When preparing the clips of my works over the past 20 years that I was asked to show you, I tried to determine whether or not I had yet accumulated 3.

I divide my work into two categories, B.C. and A.C. ( before and after computers). In 1979, I had my first, maybe my only A.C. idea. One idea that kept repeating... which is, that we are interactivity linked in the privacy of our homes by means of the television, computer or telephone and that there are enormous implications emerging between the intimate relationships of individuals and technological media systems.

In 1979 I created an interactive laser art video disk called Lorna. Perhaps it was a premonition of this conference because it was about interactivity and the home. Lorna was afraid to leave her home. Why? Because the information she received through her television kept her in a heightened state of anxiety.

The telephone became Lorna's link to the world. Viewer/ participants were able to voyeuristically overhear conversations or get different contexts by accessing separate channels as they trespassed the cyberspace of her hard-pressed life.

They were also able to find out about Lorna by accessing objects in her home. Rather than being remotely controlled, the decision unit was placed literally in their own hands. By selecting chapter numbers, they could access short vignettes about Lorna's past and future. There were 3 endings :

Lorna shoots her television set

Lorna commits suicide

The worst one of all: she can move to LA.

The value of making a work is that by the end of it, you know what you should have done instead. When making Lorna, it occurred to me that here we are in the communications revolution and yet, people have never been more isolated or perhaps lonely.

So, as a follow-up to Lorna, I made two works which used, again, a telephone, television and computer. In one, I placed seduction ads on television. Viewers could call up, leave a message, and eventually meet the model in the ad. And, Deep Contact, where viewers could actually reach out and touch a computer scanned body of a woman and thereby enter a series of paths that would lead into different adventures.

This time, however, they could navigate through variable speeds and directions, all in pursuit of a fantasy. Again, I realised that I had not transcended idea number 1, because these were also about the interaction and intimacy between people despite technological separations. The link came through the computer, telephone and a television.

About 100 years ago, at the end of the last century, we witnessed the invention of both the telephone and the automobile. Both changed our perception of time, travel, community and information. Now, at the end of this century, we witness the information superhighway, a combination of both.

As every executioner knows, the most intense shocks are electric! What is now evident is that the radical shift in communication technologies has caused a marriage of image, sound, text, telephone, telephone and computers. But this marriage can only be consummated by the interaction of a consort. And the location of the tryst is the home.

It was my hope today to leave the doors, and perhaps more aptly, the windows open in this talk; to suggest some of the ramifications of these seductive new technologies that have so subtly and skilfully invaded the privacy of our homes. As each new technology enters a society, something is sacrificed. Perhaps now, it is the notion of what privacy means.

Perhaps the potential of these systems and the potential for newly accessed communities are worth the sacrifices they require. Sacrifices such as new super surveillance systems, which in turn means different levels of censorship and diminished privacy.

Some friends of mine speak more eloquently than I do about this dilemma. They perform in Virtual Love, Seduction of a Cyborg and Twists in the Chord. None of these works, by the way, get me beyond number 1 A.C. idea, which is that they are all about relational implications of the telephone, computer or television.

Virtual Love is about a woman, Valerie, who works in a virtual reality lab.

She develops an infatuation with one of two identical researchers, Barry.

In order to get him to notice her, she implants a model into his computer and they begin a distanced, on line romance.

But Barry wants to make it real and by doing so, he tampers with the fantasy of their relationship.

Now, in this piece, a woman began to have doses of technology to which she eventually became addicted. Each immersive fix tampers with her sense of the world, creates a manufactured illusion and reduces her own ability to see clearly.

And this leads us into Twists in the Chord, which I have just completed. In this, Michelle, a filmmaker, is interrupted in the middle of the night and asked to do a documentary about the telephone.

She uses the Internet to find out of about the past as she calls up experts, including Watson, and begins an online romance with RU Sirius.

As the progeny of these merged technologies breed and replicate themselves, they raise new definitions of authenticity. For instance, is simulation like the edge of a whirlpool that radiates from a centre with diminished velocity and veracticity as it expands... does it have more layers but less depth... or indeed, is the interaction with new technologies so diabolical that authenticity can only be recognised when it is electronically disguised?

Let's open up the windows further and look at how the new extensions of communication may impact censorship and surveillance. I extended the meaning of censorship to include lack of access or information, because this is how class systems and generational truth will be formed. Let me explain. In some on line dictionaries, for instance, the Black Panthers are not listed. This omission renders them invisible to future generations. Access to information and methods of technologies is where class separations will begin. When there is an imbalance in this usage hierarchy there will be an erosion of democratic empowerment. Toys in the home are changing and so are the dynamics of identity.

For instance, Mattel has announced a new hacker Barbie that comes equipped with Barbie's own X terminal. Dressed in a dirty shirt and worn out jeans and thick glasses... she can stare at a screen without blinking for 12 hours straight and her vocabulary consists of technical terms that are supposed to teach ethics and training for purchasers!

But whose ethics? As we stay in our homes, stationary nomads, travelling through the single unit combination of television, telephone and computer, perhaps we will become like Lorna, recipients of silent messages that seep into our homes, float into our consciousness and re inform the invention of out lives. Float may be a key word. For floating is the only form of motion from which aggression is absent... and... it is peaceful, non-polluting and highly popular among modern angels all of whom, by the way, get e-mail.