The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I

A Cinema of Intelligent Agents: Conceiving Ada and Teknolust

Very few women are creative. I would not send a daughter of mine to study physics. I’m glad my wife doesn’t know any science. My first wife did. —ALBERT EINSTEIN A CINEMA OF INTELLIGENT AGENTS: CONCEIVING ADA AND TEKNOLUST 169 MARSHA KINDER Although he voiced disdain for female scientists, Albert Einstein acknowledged that Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie was a rare exception, a creative woman. He quickly reassured his second wife, Elsa, however, that this unique woman posed no romantic threat to their marriage . Curie, he said, “has sparkling intelligence but, despite her passionate nature, is not attractive enough to be a danger to anyone.” Frau Einstein replied with confidence, “She has the soul of a herring.”1 As if to counter this misguided assumption that soulful, sexually attractive women are incapable of producing creative work in science—a view still held by many men and women— Lynn Hershman has produced two witty science fiction films about female scientists experimentingwithintelligentagents .Conceiving Ada(1997)andTeknolust(2002)bothfeatureTilda Swinton, the soulful queen of the indies, as a dangerously attractive woman who designs scienti fic innovations that empower future generations of women. These films extend Hershman ’s own ongoing work on technology and the female body. Hershman’s interest in this kind of femme fatale/genius has led her to the intriguing reallifecaseof HedyLamarr(1913–2000),whowillbethesubjectof oneof herfuturefilmprojects. Although this drop-dead gorgeous movie star from the 1940s is frequently remembered for being arrested for stealing, she is far more noteworthy for having invented, in 1942, a radio guiding system for torpedoes that was used in World War II. This invention later helped make wireless transmission and cell phones possible, but by then her patent had expired. According to Hershman, “In 1942, Lamarr had been the wife of Hitler’s arms dealer, so she knew a bitaboutwhatwasgoingon.Soshehadthisideathatsheworkedoutwithplayerpianowheels, which became the basis for the technology. She patented it and gave it to the government to win the war.”2 Bylinkingtheconflictingdiscoursesof Hollywoodstarpower,genderpolitics,science,and cybernetics,Hershmaninveststheissueof agencywithconsiderableresonance,creatingapro- ductive friction. Hershman has a distinctive knack for making quirky yet productive links that help push new media discourse beyond the arid formalism and cyberstructuralism that presently dominate the field. HERSHMAN AS INTELLIGENT AGENT As a well-known video and installation artist whose work has been exhibited in more than two hundred museums and galleries worldwide, Hershman herself is a model for the cutting-edge female as intelligent agent. She has successfully navigated a wide range of media, always mining new forms for their potential to mediate between the margins and the center. With Conceiving Ada and Teknolust, she attempted to break into the wider American independent film market. Neither film has yet received the wider distribution it deserves. Although Hershman’s work is rooted in contemporary theoretical discourse, it remains accessible to a broad audience, primarily because of the diverse pleasures it offers—wit, humor, curiosity, sensory richness, emotional engagement, inventiveness, surprise, satire, and intellectual rigor. Beginning with her art disc Lorna (1983–84), her work has frequently incorporated an interactive component, a dimension she has consistently inscribed with sexual politics . Although she has produced more than fifty films and videotapes and her feature-length video Longshot (1989) won the Grand Prize at the Festival for Video in Montebéliard, France, and the Film of the Year Award at the London Film Festival, she is perhaps best known for her award-winning Electronic Diaries (1986–), which were featured at the 1996 Berlin Film Festival. In all her work she addresses issues of personal identity, gender, and transsubjectivity and boldly uses her own body and experience as a narrative field to be explored through text, image, and performance. Hershmanhasbrokenseveralgenderbarriersinthemale-dominatedinternationalartscene. In 1994 she became the first woman in the history of the San Francisco International Film Festival to be honored both with a tribute and a retrospective of her work. The following year, alongwithPeterGreenawayandJeanBaudrillard,shewasawardedtheSiemensMedienkunstpreisbytheZentrumf ürKunstundMedientechnologie(ZKM),oneof Europe’sleadingmultimedia centers, which dubbed her “the most influential woman working in new media.” It is in this liminal space between new media and cinema that her two features, Conceiving Ada and Teknolust,arepositioned. AsHershmanwritesinhercontributiontothecataloguefortheZKM exhibition Future Cinema: Marsha Kinder 170 A Cinema of Intelligent Agents 171 The Future of Cinema has been a concern of my work for the past twenty-four years. What interested me is going beyond the screen, using new technologies to enliven and...