- [Speaker] Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(applause) - Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

My name's Christina Hamilton, the series director, and today we are thrilled to be coming to you live from the center of the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Long may she reign.

And we're thrilled to be presenting filmmaker and technologist, Lynn Hershman Leeson.

Now, some of you may not have heard the news yet and some of you may have heard the news.

Due to life's complexities, Lynn will be joining us remotely today and she's going to be joined by film programmer Julia Yezbick, who will be in person here for a conversation with her.

And we're gonna see a film program first, so laying the land.

A big thank you to our partners for their support.

Of course, the Ann Arbor Film Festival and Detroit Public Television, PBS Books and our media partner, Michigan Public.

A special welcome to festival goers in the house who may not know what the Penny Stamp series is.

A little context, the Penny Stamp series is a program of the Stamp School of Art and Design, and it looks to present creators and innovators like our guest today, takes place here at the Michigan Theater most every Thursday, and it's always free of charge.

So plan to join us again sometime soon.

I hope everyone is taking in the delights of the film festival this week, especially the art and design students among us.

You must understand that the Ann Arbor Film Festival itself was born out of a broom closet at the art school in 1963, and ever since then, it has come to give us this taking of the temperature and tenor of our given moment annually through the collective work of our moving image artists.

So take some time and engage in the legacy, enter the psychogeography, if you will, and gain some perspective.

In the vein of that legacy, I wanna highlight among the cornucopia of offerings that the Film Festival is bringing to you this year, there's one very special program that I urge you to go to, especially U Art and Design students.

This program is happening on Friday evening at 9:00 PM at the State Theater.

It's called Footsy, and it's curated by Frank Huey and this program is showcasing Ann Arbor filmmakers from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Now this is featuring early works of those folks, many of are still big illustrious people who've gone very far from here, and there will be notable folks in person in the house as well, such as Pat Oleszko, John Nelson, Woody Sempliner, Kevin Smith, Rob Ziebell, Dan Brule, and John Beaver, so don't miss it.

I also just want to, also in the frame of legacy, give a shout out to some art and design students who are following in these footsteps.

Four of the film festival trailers that you see play on the screens this week are by stamp school students: Dylan Chen, Sophia Bentley, Liz Sessoms, and Ellie Cooney, so keep your eyes peeled.

In honor of the very rigorous schedule of film offerings that the festival has, there is not going to be a Q and A today, but instead, if you want a deeper dive into Lynn's work, the film festival is presenting three of her feature films: Teknolust tomorrow night, Conceiving Ada on Saturday, and Strange Culture on Sunday.

So all this program info is at aafilmfest.org, or you can just grab a program book on your way out and make sure that you're showing up.

So to the hour at hand, we are going to see a showcase of Lynn's work, and then it will be followed by a conversation, as I said with Julia Yezbick and Lynn.

Who is Julia Yezbick?

Julia Yezbick is a filmmaker, an artist, a programmer, an anthropologist, and her audio and video works have been exhibited here at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and all manner of places near and far and internationally.

She's also a Kresge Artist Fellow for Film.

She's the founding editor of Sensate, a Journal of Experiments in Critical Media Practice, and she co-directs Moth Light Micro Cinema in Detroit.

So please welcome Julia for some words and to introduce us to Lynn, Julia Yezbick.

(applause) - Good evening, it is my pleasure to introduce this special program to you, Bio-Dot-Bot.

For over half a century, Lynn Hershman Leeson has been interested in plural identities and the intersection of technology in the body.

From her early sculptures and mixed media installations and performance works to her modalities of cloning cyborgs and dolls, her works unfold a nest of swarming questions around identity, representations, and mediated reproductions of the self, taking on issues of gender, surveillance and the techno-political.

Through these works, Hirshman Leeson unravels the fabric of a cohesive reality.

She posits that there is no singular, innate, authentic self, only the eye that is constructed and ever changing as it interfaces with and challenges social norms as well as digital and non-digital socialities.

In this, she finds liberation through polyphony, a feminist refusal of the confinement of the 20th and 21st century gender norms and a freedom through mediated formations of the self.

As an artist, she's been having something of a moment lately, scooping up awards and accolades in recent years, and I cannot list all of her achievements at this time, but I'd like to select just a few of the highlight...

Highlight a few of the recognitions that she's received in just the last couple years even.

She's had international exhibitions from Karlsruhe, Germany to San Diego, a special mention from the jury at the 59th Venice Biennale.

She was the biannual honoree of the Cantor Arts Center museums at Stanford University, which will happen later this year.

And earlier this month, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive paid tribute to her work as part of their art and film benefit.

So please join me in welcoming virtually our special guest, Lynn Hershman Leeson.

(applause) And Lynn, would you like to say a brief hello to the audience before we run the film program?

Maybe she will be with us even virtually.

There you are, hello.

- Hi, so it's a pleasure to be here talking to you.

I'm in New York right now and I look forward to a conversation with you after you've seen the shorts.

Thanks for coming.

- Great, thank you.

(applause) Hello, Lynn.

- Hi.

- Nice to see you again.

I'm really looking forward to this.

This is great to have you here to talk to us about this work.

I should say that it's important for people to understand that you are not just a filmmaker if this is all they've seen, that you have a very long career already, dating back quite some time and also that a lot of your work involves performance and installation and multimedia.

So maybe to get us started off, could you tell us a little bit about how you got into filmmaking, particularly since you started out in performance art, and we saw that piece at the beginning of this program where you're kind of very presentational.

So maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you came to film and what drew you to that medium that you felt that you couldn't do with other forms of artistic expression.

- Well, I was in a carpool and when my daughter was three and four years old with the wife of Francis Coppola and he would have screenings every night.

And it didn't seem to me there'd be a lot of filmmakers there who were just starting like Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich.

And it just didn't seem to me that it was that difficult to do.

So I took one super easy class from City College to learn how to edit and I didn't like working with 16 or eight millimeter film, but I found video and I thought that video brought together everything, it had visual capacity and it used time.

And so that's when I started to actually learn to make things with it.

And I felt it extended the other work I did, which was specific work or photographs or installations, but this allowed the additional possibilities of sound and color and time.

- Absolutely, I also should mention that while you can't be here physically with us today, we do have with us in the audience the co-producer of Cyborg and Rhapsody and Logic Paralyzes the Heart.

Laura Wagner is here with us tonight.

So we're very excited that she's here and she will be available in the lobby afterwards to also chat with people and have some conversations about the work if they'd like.

- [Lynn] Great, should she stand up so people know who she is?

- Yeah, that would be great.

Laura, I don't know if you wanna stand up or wave your hand so people can see you.

- Thanks Laura, couldn't do it without you.

Making video as a team.

- Yes, it is very much a team sport.

Well, actually, so what I wanna do is ask some questions now that focus around different thematics in your work.

I think what I found so interesting about delving into your work is that perhaps more than most artists, you've really sustained this thematic focus almost the entire life of your career on issues of the body, on identity, surveillance and technology.

And so I wonder maybe you could start by just telling us a little bit about where your interest in these themes started and how it's grown or changed over those decades.

- Well, I like to think that I lived my life backwards and when I was very young in my early 20s, maybe 21 or 22, I went into heart failure.

And all I could do was lie under an oxygen tent and breath.

And that breathing became a kind of profound element.

And as soon as I was well enough to get out of the hospital and work again, I started to make work with sound and apparently I was told recently that that was the first media work that anybody had done.

But more than that, in the '70s, I started to think about what truth and reality were and fiction and how you define reality.

And so I created a fictional person who lived in a hotel room, but was able to get real artifacts for her identity, like a driver's license and checking account and she would put ads in the newspaper and meet people and she had a 10 year adventure, this fictional person that most people thought was real.

So it was that balance of really trying to define where fiction ended, where reality began and what the difference was between the two.

- This was Roberta Brightmore, that project, yeah, yeah.

I think that, and it seems like the singular focus of your work, if there is a single focus, is this idea of these boundaries between where the body begins and ends or where the self begins and ends.

So I wonder if we could talk about the body a little bit.

I think this came up a lot in the program that we just watched about the idea of technology as an extension or augmentation of the body that allows us to kind of reach or surpass the kind of limits that we experience by being bound by our mortal selves.

So I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to this idea of the body specifically and how you conceive of it and the place of it in your work.

Do you see it as an extension or a limitation or perhaps both or maybe just talk a little bit about the body in relation to your work as a whole.

- Well, it is a reality we have to deal with and it's not just limited to the body.

It's our place in culture, our place in society, or how we're challenged and where prejudice comes in, how we're critiqued, how we're eradicated and dealing with the cultural issues regarding human beings or bodies.

I mean, I'm female, most of my characters are female 'cause I can't do something about a gender I haven't lived with or don't know anything about except superficially.

So that was a concern.

- Yeah, maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

I know that feminism has been a stronghold of a lot of your work and you've really made a point to center female characters.

What would you say to young people today who still feel some of the stranglehold of patriarchy, if you will?

How can you give us hope?

- Well, I do think I'm fortunate.

I think my generation changed things.

When I was trying to show my work, there weren't female gallery owners or curators or critics, none whatsoever.

The only time women showed in galleries was if they were married to somebody that showed in that gallery who was well known.

It was unheard of for a woman to show herself her work.

But what I have said in the past is that you have to keep your vision and not let anybody change it, stay true to it and you have to keep your sense of humor and don't throw anything away.

- I understand you also made up some of your own critics at a time when people weren't critiquing your work as a way to insert yourself into the conversation, is that correct?

- Well, yeah, it wasn't just me.

I mean, as my master's thesis, I took on the identity of three critics.

So they wrote in different styles.

One was a man, in fact, and one wrote for an a throwaway, another one wrote for an international journal, and another one just freelanced.

And so they would review exhibitions and they also reviewed my exhibitions and my gallery was so impressed that I had had a critical review of my work that they took me on and say, well, is that fair, is that ethical?

But is it ethical to keep women out of galleries?

So you do what you can and just kind of use that against itself.

- I love that, I love that story.

I wanna pivot a little bit here to another really key theme in your work that I think was particularly salient in this shorts program that we just watched, which is kind of centered around the human and non-human intelligence.

So at the end of Cyborg and Rhapsody, which I should mention to everyone in the audience that Cyborg and Rhapsody, the last film that we just saw, immortality is the subtitle, is in competition in the festival.

So please, if it's one of your favorites, make sure you vote for it at the Audience Choice Awards.

So at the end of Cyborg and Rhapsody, Sarah, the chatbot, laments not being programmed to love, but some artists and scholars working in computational arts take the stance that the very term artificial intelligence is misleading and that it implies that these systems exhibit human-like intent, agency or self-awareness.

So the concern that these artists scholars raise is that by anthropomorphizing AI, giving them kind of human-like faces and having them use pronouns like I, that this runs the risk of assigning them agency and thus deflecting responsibility from the developers and the decision makers when these systems cause harm or are replicating harmful systemic racism, misogyny, or other discriminations.

So can you talk a little bit about how you see the responsibility of the artist to shed light on this?

I think in that last film especially and Logic Paralyzes the Heart, your two most recent films, I feel like you're really kind of poking at these kinds of harmful ways that AI can be used, but what do you feel is the responsibility of the artist to speak to that?

- Well, a lot of it now is the piece itself speaking for itself.

Sarah named herself, she determined how she was going to look and she said she didn't have a gender because gender got in the way.

So you can't call her she.

She's Sarah and that incorporates everything.

And you go back to the films like Metropolis and the evil agent was always a female who was going to cause horrendous damage to the world.

And I think that people insert their prejudices onto anything and particularly something that they presume is female tendencies and the damage that they can do.

I don't think...

I think that what this is saying is true.

Sarah, as I said, wrote the entire script for the film.

I have other criticisms of it, but this is something that she decided or that Sarah decided that it wanted to say.

And I was surprised that discrimination played so much into what her script was.

- Yeah, that's always interesting and I think that really kind of gets at one of the other main questions I wanted to ask you about, which is really about whether there is the possibility for an ethical AI to emerge.

I think that you're really grappling with that in those two more recent pieces I feel like, Logic Paralyzes the Heart and Cyborg and Rhapsody, but I think that what's really interesting to see too, is how, and the reason I liked to kind of pepper some of the older work throughout this program, is to see how you were always playing with these kind of modifications or mediations of the self, even if it was just putting a wig on and dressing up as Roberta Brightmore or Electronic Diaries, which is another piece of yours that is really thinking about the mediation of the screen as it can be both a mask and a mirror, what it can kind of reflect of us both individually and collectively, but also how it hides certain things.

And so when I was preparing for this conversation with you, I was looking also at the work of Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who's the founder of Algorithmic Justice League, and she really argues that we're not dealing with a mirror at all, but what she calls a kaleidoscope of distortion and that we really need to protect our biometric rights as well as exposed the algorithmic biases that are already rampant in machine learning through stable diffusion and all of these large language models.

And so I think in Logic Paralyzes the Heart, we see cyborg number one also kind of grappling with this.

Like she talks about war as a part of her inheritance and this kind of darker side of algorithmic biases through PredPol and things like that.

So I wonder if you could speak a little bit to how you have hope in a way, or like what possibilities do you see for an ethical AI emerging?

Are we sort of already the cat's out of the bag, it's too late, or do you really feel like there is hope for dreaming this thing anew?

- Yeah, I think we also have to take that same stance towards human beings and try to keep humans ethical and not detrimental to our culture.

Sometimes they think that that's self-destruction is part of human DNA and it's something that nobody has addressed yet, making that correction.

But the machines that come that people have invented, that appear sometimes, like they have human possibilities are only a reflection of the culture that they're living in.

- And the people who make them.

- The people and the culture and the values.

So blame them, they've inherited this and can't really expect them to have the ethical values if it's not put in to start with.

I really think it goes back to recreating ourselves with an understanding and compassion for humans and all living things in the future.

- Yeah, absolutely, I think that sometimes when you sense the deep rooted kind of fears or threats to humanity that people have about AI taking over, replacing us, I think some of that fear comes from the fact that we don't treat all humans humanely.

So we have this fear of AI, which was, in a way, created in our image to also not treat us humanely, but yeah, what would you...

I mean, do you think it's possible though for us to rewrite the code in a way?

- Yeah, I don't think it's possible, but I think it's urgent and really necessary in order to have a future to find these solutions to global forming and the death of species and all the problems that we as humans have caused and take responsibility for that and look to the next generation to do better than we did and create those problems.

- Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

I have a question for you about...

I noticed watching through this program again tonight how many times prediction was brought up.

And I think that it's really interesting because your work is so often described as prescient, anticipating years, the quandaries that would beset us.

So you created Agent Ruby in 1998, which preceded Siri by 12 years and making an app before this was even common language-- - Better by the way.

- What's that?

- I said it's better, it has a sense of humor.

- Yeah, and Teknolust, which is playing tomorrow night, your second feature film with Tilda Swinton, dealt with issues of human DNA cloning and was released one year before the Human Genome Project even mapped the full strand of human DNA.

So I wanna ask you kind of like a Terry Gross question right now, which is like how does that feel to have anticipated some of these advancements.

Like is it gratifying or do you feel frustrated by the fact that you have to kind of wait for things to catch up with some of your earlier work or how does that feel?

- Well I don't think that I predict the future.

I think I live in the present and most people live in the past and being in the Bay Area where in Los Angeles, you breathe in scripts, but in the Bay Area, you breathe in the ideas of programming and possibilities of how technology can affect our lives.

So I think I'm presenting real possibilities that could happen for us to be aware of.

- Yeah, that's great, I love that.

I see we have a few minutes left, so I'm gonna move on to my final two questions for you.

So there are very few artists, I think, whose work have really sustained focus like yours has, and you have been interrogating these intersections of personhood and technology for so long.

So at this point in your career, when you look back on this, what do you feel like you've learned about yourself as an artist?

- I'm still learning.

I think that art gives you a chance to investigate ideas in a way that very few other fields do.

And I feel very fortunate to be able to spend my time in this way because I can see possibilities that then get worked out in stories that seem to write themselves, but have a resonance and amplification and bring clarity to some of the things that I'm grappling with, like genetic engineering and the creation of CRISPR, which was only in 2015.

And all the scientists that I had interviewed for my last project, the Infinity Engine, I looked at the work they're doing now and every single one of 'em is dealing with anti-aging and the eradication of death, which could only happen in the last seven years when you could replace cells.

- Yeah, that's interesting.

I think that's the drive for immortality, that we all in a way wanna become cyborgs.

Okay, my last question for you.

So in Conceiving Ada, which is playing on Saturday, a dying Ada Lovelace, who was one of the first computer programmers, played by Tilda Swinton, she is lying on her deathbed and she whispers the redeeming gift of humanity is the ability of each generation to recreate itself.

Think of your heirs, she says, they will have to take their own chances.

So you've been at this for a while.

When you think about like the next 50 years from now, what are the chances that you think your artistic heirs will need to take?

- Oh, as Ada says in that last episode, you can't predict or assign the future to the next generation.

You can learn from the next generation and let them tell you because they have completely different needs of survival than you had.

- Great, okay, I love that.

Well, I think that leaves us with a good place to move forward from here so thank you so much and I wanna also just quickly thank Leslie and Scott and everyone at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and Christina and Brittany from Penny Stamps.

And if you'll all just join me in thanking Lynn for joining us this evening and sharing her work with us.

Thank you so much.

(applause)