Private I

PRIVATE I: The memoir of Lynn Hershman Leeson, the artist who was making work about surveillance, artificial intelligence and invented identity decades before the culture caught up—from the Roberta Breitmore performances to the Tilda Swinton films—illustrated throughout from her own archive.

For five years in the 1970s, Lynn Hershman Leeson lived part of her life as somebody else. Roberta Breitmore was a performance persona who moved through the real world and its institutions, and she prefigured by decades everything the culture would later come to say about digital identity and surveillance. At the time, most of the art world declined to call her art at all.

Private I is Hershman Leeson’s account of a career spent making work that arrived too early to be recognized. In the 1970s women artists were routinely dismissed unless they could be attached to a more successful man. Defying that, Hershman Leeson built her own path: the Roberta Breitmore series, the Video Diaries, and the feature films starring Tilda Swinton, Conceiving Ada and Teknolust. Her installations went up in the places that would have her—hotels, department store windows, San Quentin State Prison, housing projects—while she raised her daughter and endured long stretches of poverty. To make room for other artists she launched The Floating Museum, which put site-specific work into reclaimed public space. She was among the first to document women artists’ lives and work on film, in the acclaimed !W.A.R. (Women, Art, Revolution).

The list of technologies she has taken up and turned against itself is the real spine of the book: video, artificial intelligence, chatbots, touch screens, robotics, and finally her own DNA. Each was a way of asking the same question about identity, and a way of warning about surveillance long before anyone wanted the warning. Her collaborators and fellow travelers—Eleanor Coppola, George Lucas, Tilda Swinton—appear here as people rather than credits.

Private I is also an object: a full-color volume drawn from Hershman Leeson’s own archive, with rare documentation of Roberta Breitmore and the early interactive works. At its center is a portrait of resilience—of a life sustained through friendship, family and fearless invention, by an artist who turned out to be right.

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