Lynn Hershman Leeson — Lorna

1983

Artists: Lynn Hershman Leeson · Year: 1983 · Medium: Interactive laserdisc videodisc (branching narrative) · Substrate: Laserdisc with interactive menu system; viewer chooses branches via keypad · Place: San Francisco, California, USA · Institution: Self-produced; initial distribution through Video Data Bank Lorna is a 1983 interactive laserdisc videodisc by Lynn Hershman Leeson, considered the first interactive art videodisc made by an American artist and one of the earliest narrative-interactive computer art works from anyone. The viewer sits at a terminal and makes choices — what to look at, what to read, where to go — and the laserdisc responds by branching to the chosen narrative path. The subject is a woman named Lorna who has not left her apartment in many years; the viewer explores her possessions, her phone messages, her television, piecing together her story through what Hershman Leeson has placed in the environment. What Lorna argued in 1983 was that interactive media was not merely a technical novelty but a narrative medium with specific formal properties — the viewer's agency, the branching structure, the impossibility of seeing the whole of any given viewing — that could be exploited by artists working on psychological and social themes. Hershman Leeson's own characterization of the work as a drama about alienation and agoraphobia, presented in a form that forces the viewer to enter the protagonist's closed world, gets at the argument's subtlety. Hershman Leeson has continued working across video, installation, and net-art practice for the four decades since. Her later works include Teknolust (2002, a feature-length film exploring cloning and AI) and The Infinity Engine (2016, on synthetic biology). She is represented in most major museum collections. Born 1941, she is one of the few still-living first-generation figures working across interactive electronic media. Lore Hershman Leeson came to interactive video from a performance-art background. Her earlier work The Dante Hotel (1972-73) was a weeks-long performance-installation in a real San Francisco hotel room. Lorna was funded partly by an NEA grant and partly by a private collector who agreed to underwrite the laserdisc production. The original laserdisc is rare; SFMOMA has a copy, and Hershman Leeson's archive at Stanford holds master materials. She received the Siegfried Zielinski Prize in 2014 and the Wolf Foundation Prize in 2024. Sources • Hershman Leeson, Lynn — personal archive at lynnhershman.com • SFMOMA — Hershman Leeson collection • Stanford University — Lynn Hershman Leeson papers