Self Portrait as Another Person (1965) by Lynn Hershman Leeson (1941, Cleveland, Ohio) consists of a black wax cast of the artist’s face, wearing a wig and red lipstick. The tape recorder underneath plays a recording of Hershman Leeson’s breathing. A motion sensor activates the work to ‘speak’ to viewers, occasionally asking personal questions, such as: ‘What is your greatest fear?’ or ‘Could you tell me about your first sexual experience?’ While Hershman Leeson’s work is now celebrated for its radical engagement with technology and media, the artist remembers a different reception for the work when it was first shown: ‘At the time, people hated it. They wouldn’t let it be seen. The show was taken down within twenty-four hours, and it took about fifty-four years before I could show those pieces again. Nobody would display these works back then because people kept saying it wasn’t art.’

The mixed-media drawing X-Ray Woman (1966) depicts a female figure (resembling the artist). The torso and upper thighs are decorated with a fragmentary, complex interplay of cogs, wheels, conveyor belts, tissues and organs, implying the inner workings of the body. Flesh and machinery are seamlessly interconnected. Just a few years after the term ‘cyborg’ was first coined to refer to a cybernetic organism, Hershman Leeson envisioned this hybrid being in her work, drawing upon her own self-image and using her own voice to make an image that is part human, part machine.