Over the last five decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films. Cited as one of the most influential media artists, Hershman Leeson is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues that are now recognized as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Over the last fifty years she has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, artificial intelligence, bio art, installation and interactive as well as net-based media art. ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, mounted the first comprehensive retrospective of her work titled Civic Radar.
Logic Paralyzes the Heart explores the entanglements between the body and digital- as well as military-based systems of control. It comprises a wallpaper featuring the faces of “missing people” that have been generated by AI, together with a video narrated by a 61-year-old cyborg reflecting on her life.
Blurring the line between the human and the artificially generated, this multi-media installation complicates the relationship between identity and authenticity. Where the perceived veracity of the human representatives is marked by a double void – their status as “missing” people and the fact that their faces have no ground in reality—their AI counterpart is humanised through her personal account of life as a cyborg. Logic Paralyzes the Heart muddies the distinction between the human and non-human, while simultaneously highlighting the human labour implicated in digital technologies—a fitting commentary in an age of surveillance, Big Tech and the growing sophistication of Artificial Intelligence with large language models such as ChatGPT.
Logic Paralyzes the Heart comes to Te Tuhi from the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – The Milk of Dreams in 2022, where Lynn Hershman Leeson was awarded a special mention from the Jury.
