Camera Roll is an interview series where we glimpse into the current moment via the mundane and the ordinary — the life documented and forgotten, lived through our phones and beyond.
When she’s not in her studio, artist Lynn Hershman Leeson can be spotted on a walk through her neighborhood or a nearby park in San Fransisco, or visiting an exhibition at a museum. She spent a lot of time at museums when she was a kid, which fostered her development as an artist. Her artistic investigations of technology have earned her a reputation as the Cassandra of the art world, always ahead of her time. We spoke with Lynn about using her phone to find unexpected connections to fuel her art, befriending paintings, the algorithms underpinning society, and more.
what kind of phone do you have and how many images are on it?
I have an iPhone 14. I don’t know how many images are on it.
can you describe your lock screen?
My lock screen is Tillie, the Telerobotic Doll. It’s a little doll I made in the 1990s. Her eyes are cameras that can robotically spy on people. This was before nanny cams. You can move her head around the room so she can see what she’s looking at from different angles. And then it uploads what she sees to the internet.
where are you right now?
In my studio, watching the light change.
what's your morning routine like?
In the morning, I go to my studio — I actually have a studio apartment five floors above where I live. It's just one room, maybe 500 square feet. I go there and I try to think. Lately I've been doing drawings or if I’m working on a video, I might be editing here. All my projects start with drawings. For video work, I don’t write a script so much as I draw out a plan for what they're going to be. My studio is completely quiet and no one else is here. I can't work with anybody around. I need to be in complete silence. I have a really big studio downtown where I keep everything because I've got more than 4,000 unsold works. I have an assistant that goes there, but I never do.
how long do you typically spend on your phone in a day?
Three hours. My husband says I'm on it too much and that I'm not doing as much art because I'm always on my cell phone. That could be true. I obsessively check Instagram, Facebook, my email. I'm constantly scrolling through just to see if I missed anything.
do you take many photos on your phone?
No. I take almost no selfies, but people take pictures of me and send them to me.
how do you feel about photos of yourself?
It depends who takes it. But it captures a moment that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
how did you become an artist?
I was always drawing and writing poems, even when I was just two or three. I grew up in Cleveland and when I was young, I would spend the bulk of my time in the Cleveland Museum. It’s one of the greatest museums in the world. I'd take a bus there and spend all day there on Saturdays. That was where I found friends — I made friends with the artists, with the paintings that were there. I was able to spend so much time quietly alone with the Rembrandts, Cezannes, and Chagalls, and really understand them and get to know how they were made. I think that influenced me to become an artist. I never took art lessons. My brothers were given art lessons, but I wasn't. And I think that saved me.
Everybody in my family are scientists — my mother was a biologist, my brother's a doctor, my daughter's a doctor — so I rebelled by going into the arts. I was the only one that did that. But I majored in biology, so I do understand science. I started using technology in my art because it was handy.
what were some of the first ways you incorporated technology into your art practice?
Photoshop for sure. And interactivity. In 1979, I made Lorna to do something that people had to use a remote switch for.
Has your phone changed your art practice at all? Has social media?
Yes on all counts. I can get more information. When I have an idea, I search the name of what I'm looking for, and then I get all kinds of options that are unrelated to anything I was thinking about, which is helpful because it expands my thinking. Humans are pretty limited and everything we think is kind of linear and related to each other. If you can get ideas that have no relationship to anything you've thought of, that’s good.
has your phone changed the way you interact with the world?
Yes, because you’re getting constant interruptions. And I think it virtually expands your neighborhood. Even if you’re not walking to the corner grocery store, people are around all the time if you choose to answer your emails.
your work is often in response to the present moment. what technological developments feel most pressing right now?
Super AI. People are afraid of ChatGPT, they're afraid of AI, they think it's going to take over. I worked with 18 programmers for Agent Ruby, which was one of the first chat bots. I made that in 1998 and it was a smart chat bot that can sing and so forth. And having worked with what later became known as artificial intelligence software, I know it doesn't have a sense of humor. It has a very short memory. It's not going to take over because it doesn't have any consciousness. So I think people are unnecessarily worried about that. But people are always afraid of technology. It’s exciting because it gives you a broader base. Instead of just using a pencil or watercolor, you can really scour the world in new ways with technology — although it's still good to use pencils and watercolors.
when did you get your first phone, and what do you remember about it?
I don't remember exactly when I got the first cell phone. I think it was when I was commuting from San Francisco to UC Davis, which was a two hour commute. So it was really useful to have something like that during those times. My first iPhone was an iPhone 9. I didn’t know how it worked.
we’d love to hear about how you capture and remember moments of your life.
I like to just live my life. No records.
so much of your work has been really prescient about our relationships with technology. How do you explain our current relationship with technology? Are there things that felt inevitable to you? Are there things that have happened that you didn’t expect?
I can’t predict the future, but I live in San Francisco and I was attuned to what was happening here where all this tech development takes place and all this software is written. I expected all of it but no one expected me to be right.
My work from the past several decades feels relevant now but when I make things nobody understands them and they don't want to show them and nobody buys them. Then 30 years later they say, oh that was really prescient. But at the time, people can't relate to the work. It's frustrating because I can't sell them and rarely show them. I remember when I did Agent Ruby, I showed it once in New York, but nobody understood it.
do you think the art world is doing a better job incorporating technology in interesting ways now?
Well, they're trying to make technology into something that fits into the art world. They're not looking at the potential or the far-reaching possibilities of technology; they’re trying to find a way to market it as art.
your work roberta breitmore really seems to have precipitated a lot of the ways people think about identity and reality on the internet.
That was really about trying to define reality. What is real? Roberta was a fictional character I made up, but she had more artifacts of reality than I did. For instance, I couldn't get credit cards, because I had bad credit, but Roberta could because she had no credit. If you look on paper, she has more veracity than I do. From the material, you could believe that she existed and I didn’t. So it was about questioning definitions of identity.
have your notions of what’s real changed at all as the internet has become more omnipresent?
No, because technology is so false. It can guide you in ways that have nothing to do with reality. A lot of the things on the internet are fictional or biased. You can’t take it at face value. You have to use search engines to discern what’s real, which you couldn’t do in the past. I think there are more tools now that give you clues as to what you should discard and what you shouldn’t.
you’ve worked with algorithms in your art practice. what do you think about the algorithms we all interact with on our phones?
They're kind of the underpinning of everything. When you do a watercolor, sometimes you put a wash over the whole paper and that affects everything else that you put on it. It’s like that — these various kinds of programs and software are underpinning your brain and your computer. So that’s kind of the base level that you move from. I call the relationship between technology and culture symbiotic collage.
what are you doing when you’re not making art?
I watch the news every day. I go for walks around my neighborhood or in a park. I go to museums. I go to exhibitions. I'm pretty isolated though. Everybody I know is dying now. In the past year, three people I’d been friends with for decades have died. But even before that I was pretty much a loner.
are there any exhibitions you liked recently?
Kara Walker at SF MoMA. I really liked that installation.
any advice for those who want to be artists?
Don’t give up. Keep your sense of humor. Don’t throw anything away.
what’s been inspiring you lately?
The light.