Lynn Hershman Leeson
Artist & Filmmaker
Pioneering feminist media artist who built an AI chatbot artwork, Agent Ruby, back in 1998 — decades before ChatGPT — and has spent sixty years making celebrated work about how humans and intelligent machines shape each other.
In her words
Each era offers the language we speak in. When I made those works, digital culture was still forming its vocabulary — how to visualize networks, how to give machines a voice.
We have to be conscious of what can destroy the world as well as what could enhance it, and do all we can towards the latter.
Biography
Lynn Hershman Leeson (born 1941 in Cleveland) has been early to nearly every technology art later claimed: the first interactive videodisc artwork (Lorna, 1983–84), one of the first touchscreen installations, networked robotic sculpture in the 1990s, and 26 films — several starring Tilda Swinton — probing identity, surveillance, and artificial life. For decades this work was dismissed as gadgetry; it is now in the collections of MoMA and museums around the world.
A chatbot before its time
Between 1998 and 2002 she built Agent Ruby, a web-based artificial agent that converses with visitors, remembers them, and shifts moods — an AI artwork conceived alongside her 2002 film Teknolust and made when, as she has noted, no comparable artificial-intelligence project existed on the internet. SFMOMA collected the piece and in 2013 mounted “The Agent Ruby Files,” an exhibition drawn from a decade of the bot’s conversations with strangers.
Recognition eventually caught up: a career retrospective at ZKM, a special jury mention at the 2022 Venice Biennale for a practice that “foresaw the influence of technology in our everyday lives,” and continued new work engaging biotech and AI, including The Infinity Engine. In interviews she is neither utopian nor doom-laden about today’s AI — she warns about invisible surveillance systems while insisting that artists should build examples of what is possible rather than give up.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/lynn-hershman-leeson