Lynn Hershman is an an American filmmaker and artist whose work centers around the relationship between technology and humans, the use of media to empower people against censorship and, most significantly, identity. She has worked in a wide range of mediums from photography, video and film, to performance installation and net based media art. Hershman’s construction of the fictional “Roberta Breitmore” (acting as an alter-ego) is what I find most relevant to our project. Hershman essentially constructed Breitmore’s entire identity, gathering make-up, clothes, credit cards and even correspondence from her psychiatrist to formulate the perfect persona. Her influence for me, personally, is great as just as she hopes to entirely construct an identity, our group wishes to deconstruct our own in order to create a culmination of all of us.
Other works we were influenced by seemed to comment on humans connection to the technological or, in my interpretation, the displayed self and the true self. As perception is a key theme to our project, these felt relevant to our research.
