Lynn Hershman Leeson
Infinity Engine
June 7 - July 31, 2018
Lynn Hershman Leeson has been a pioneer in media art since the 1960s creating works that address the interplay between technology, media and identity and the changing relationship between the body and technology. She examines the new technological tools’ impact on our private sphere, our ideas about identity and individuality, and our relationship with the real and virtual world. She began working with the themes of artificial intelligence and virtual reality in the early 1990s having recognized that it was no longer necessary to have a physical body to adopt a fictitious identity in the global network.
With The Infinity Engine, the artist returns to the themes of identity based on real, highly topical scientific findings and technologies, raising questions of how identities can be safeguarded in the age of genetic engineering. Hershman Leeson has created a functional replica of a genetics lab in collaboration with well-known scientists. Built of modular units, The Infinity engine is a flexible and scalable environment can be adapted to different locations and reflects current standards in genetic research. Hershman Leeson explores the mounting influence of genetic engineering on human life. Using photographs and films on the latest achievements in molecular and cell biology, bioprinted organs as well as genetically modified organisms, the artist poses the question as to how far human intervention in DNA is ethically acceptable and what social and political impact it has.
