November 15, 2019 – October, 2020
Slip into the world of Lorna, a fictional, middle-aged woman too obsessed with TV to leave her apartment. Sit in Lorna’s chair and use her remote control to choose her fate in an interactive video. Thirty-six user-selected paths lead you through the character’s grim desires and glossy distractions.
Lorna (1979–84) is regarded as the first interactive video artwork ever created and was originally produced on laserdisc. This was the most advanced video technology in the early 1980s, which the artist customized beyond its normal functions. A video game of life’s choices, Lorna represents the crossroads we face in our digital era: is technology liberating or alienating?
Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941) has been called a “prophet of our cybernetic condition” by the New York Times. Working in San Francisco since the mid-1960s, she developed digital alter-egos like Lorna to investigate how new technologies extend the body and psyche into virtual space. Her high-tech, interactive artworks predicted many of today’s concerns with digital culture, including camera surveillance, online identities, artificial intelligence, and gene editing.
