Between 1973 and 1978, Lynn Hershman Leeson hired photographers to document the life of her alter ego, Roberta Breitmore. Dressed in a glossy blond wig, white blouse, and polka-dot skirt, Hershman Leeson as Roberta would saunter around San Francisco—to the bank, therapy, out on a date—all the while being monitored and photographed. Across the ocean, Sophie Calle, dressed in a similar blond wig, trailed an unwitting stranger on his trip from Paris to Venice, documenting his meals, his hotel visits. Two years later, in 1981, she asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her around town, capturing her daily activities as the paparazzi might a celebrity’s. Long before contemporary surveillance culture and the emergence of social media—which allows us to follow others and construct a self to be followed—both artists insisted, against the consoling fiction of a private, autonomous self, that we have always lived in public. Assembling diary entries and snapshots, records and artifacts, they present the self as a composite, an amalgamation of experiences and encounters, of which—and this is critical—they remain the authors.
The works presented in Hershman Leeson’s exhibition Deep Fake, at Hoffman Donahue in Beverly Hills, California, and Calle’s first North American survey at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa, Overshare, trace the overlaps and divergences between the artists’ investigations, beginning in the 1970s, into the relationship between the self and other, the self and the screen, and, ultimately, the self as something constructed in relation to itself. Both titles name tensions central to their practices: Overshare describes an artist who exerted tremendous editorial control over the public presentation of her life and work, whereas Deep Fake refers not to an artificial image or video, but to a genuine attempt to understand what it means to be human, to contain multitudes, and to be constantly in a state of becoming. Their experiments in feminist identity register today as early prototypes of what we might call digital subjectivity—selves constructed through documentation, commercialization, and algorithmic mediation. As Hershman Leeson leveraged emergent technology, like cyborg prototypes and interactive videodiscs that viewers could manipulate with a remote control, to test how identity might be augmented by external systems and avatars, Calle explored the psychosocial dynamics that would animate such forms of selfhood, including self-curation, commodification, and performance (behaviors that platforms like Instagram and TikTok would later scale beyond recognition).
Upon inception in 1973, Roberta checked into the Dante Hotel, where she stayed while she looked for an apartment. She went on to obtain a driver’s license, a Weight Watchers membership, a medical history. As she amassed records and routines, the distinction between artist and simulated persona sharpened bureaucratically. Roberta, Hershman Leeson observed, could do things she herself could not, like qualify for a credit card. Socially and psychically, however, the line between fact and fiction, self and other, seemed to dissolve. On the far wall of the first gallery, a series of prints traces the artist’s transformation, beginning with Lynn Becoming Roberta #7 (1973–78), a warm, color photograph in which the artist faces her mirror with one hand raised to her cheek, mid-application, caught in the act of construction. The body, in motion, is blurred, resolutely alive. Beside it, Roberta at Mirror #1 (1978) presents the persona, fully realized: The image is black and white, the body in the foreground reduced to a flat, faceless silhouette, while Roberta’s statuesque reflection commands the center. Here the constructed self is more present in the frame than the self that constructed her. The shift recalls psychoanalyst Joan Rivière’s notion of masquerade: Womanliness, she argued, could be assumed and worn as a mask. What Hershman Leeson demonstrates is that, worn long enough, the mask can become indistinguishable from the face, the individual subsumed by the social roles. Her total immersion into a self shaped by a preexisting script—the conditions of femininity that preceded and outlasted Hershman Lesson’s inhabitation of them—anticipates how our digital selves are formed by codes we didn’t write. AI systems and algorithms reward certain performances and preferences while suppressing others, insidiously manipulating our behaviors, depleting our agency. The self we present online only feels like the product of personal expression, when in fact it’s been optimized, incentivized, constrained, and conformed by unknown forces to unknown ends.
Similar to Hershman Leeson, Calle is interested in the material composition of a person, and what such artifacts reveal or conceal. But whereas Hershman Leeson displaced the self through an avatar, Calle maintained her position as first-person narrator, whether in unpacking her own subjectivity or projecting onto the identities of others. In True Stories (1988–present), Calle presents a collection of her personal belongings, including a crimson ball gown, a four-poster bed, a terry-cloth bathrobe, a blond bob wig, and an Eiffel Tower lamp, as though they were artifacts in a history-museum diorama—save for the taxidermy and artificial foliage. Each object is numbered; each number corresponds to an expository text. Of the bathrobe, for instance, she writes: “I was eighteen years old. I rang the bell. He opened the door. He was wearing the same bathrobe as my father. … He became my first love. For an entire year. He obeyed my request and never let me see him naked from the front.” On the surface, the encounter feels intimate, confessional, as though you had stumbled into the artist’s bedroom unannounced. Yet that effect is as much the result of omission and fabrication as it is exposure, proving that vulnerability and authenticity can be convincingly staged.
Removed from the broader narrative of Calle’s life, the artifacts remain only partially legible: less windows onto her interior world than projections of a carefully curated persona. “They give us the structure of the secret,” wrote curator and critic Robert Storr in Sophie Calle: The Reader, “but not the secret itself.” Her careful cataloging of the lives of others is epitomized in nearby works from her hotel series. In 1981, Calle took a job as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel, where she rifled through the personal effects of the guests, opening their suitcases, reading their diaries, going through their private documents, all the while taking photographs and composing speculative biographies. In the large, framed text-and image-composition, The Hotel, Room 44 (1981), a torn-up postcard, a towel thrown in a bidet, a row of shoes, and a drooping balloon become the basis for narration. She arranges fragments into fantasies—which disclose more about the teller than the subject—and demonstrates how private life, when curated for public consumption, is turned into fiction. The parallels to the ways we stage intimacy on our social media profiles to satisfy audience’s hunger for an “authentic” glimpse into our offline lives are striking. Vulnerability, of the order that Calle evoked, has become a strategy that’s optimized for the viewer—not offered to them—often in the service of economic gain. What we consume in its place is a hyperstylized, highly curated version of experience, against which our unedited, monotonous, exasperating, often painful lives rarely hold up.
Technology advanced, and so too did Hershman Leeson’s practice. Though the physical embodiment of Roberta was exorcised at the crypt of Lucrezia Borgia in 1978—a performance that symbolically released the artist from the persona—she was later resurrected first as CybeRoberta (1996), then again as Roberta in Second Life (2005), both of which incorporated and probed the latest in digitalization. CybeRoberta’s counterpart Tillie, the Telerobotic Doll (1995), is propped on a plinth in the second gallery. Among the first telerobotic devices linked to the internet, Tillie has a webcam in one eye and a video camera in the other, rendering her an agent of surveillance. Approach the auburn-haired doll in the emerald taffeta dress seated before a makeup mirror, and you find yourself reflected in a small monitor when you cross the doll’s gaze. Scan the QR code, and a website appears with a CCTV-style live stream of the room alongside controls that move the doll’s head left and right. Straddling the human and digital, they’re hybrid beings that see as much as they’re seen, lest you forget that the moment they see you, they capture and upload your image, converting it to data. At the same time, they operate as prosthetic entities, extending human capacities, while rendering the online user a hybrid too. Still, the viewer believes they’re operating Tillie, rather than completing her: “By looking through Tillie’s eyes,” reads the website, “you’ve become … a cyborg!” Beyond addressing our current surveillance state, the dolls also foretell our total reliance on technology, as we navigate the world through screens and camera phones. Today, we fashion ourselves with that digital gaze in mind: outsourcing identity rather than developing it through unmediated introspection. We encounter and interact with our self-image on screens framed by social platforms, incentivized by algorithms, and subject to the constant assessments of strangers. In other words, we see ourselves through the lens of the machine.
What both artists seemed to have understood is that the self is always assembled, a composite of everything we’ve ever experienced, everyone we’ve ever met, all the records we’ve upkept, all the evidence we’ve left. What they could not yet anticipate was how thoroughly the construction of that self would be absorbed into technological systems—or how their authorial control over it might be institutionalized and mined. Hershman Leeson ended Roberta in 1978, burning her photograph and performing a ritual ceremony. Even her later interactive works, from the doll clones to the videodiscs, remained governed by the parameters she herself established. Likewise, Calle has to this day never maintained a social media account and has never once made work about the man she’s been with for decades. Their composite subjects remained their own. Today, by contrast, identity is increasingly assembled elsewhere: across databases, media platforms, AI agents, and algorithms that collect, recombine, augment, and edit our experiences with little regard for consent or autonomy. Ads overdetermine our preferences. Feeds manipulate our politics. Platforms not only fracture our self-image, they offload our memories and deplete our critical faculties. Our right to opacity and self-invention is undermined by systems we have no choice but to participate in. Before I leave Hoffman Donahue’s Beverly Hills gallery space, I listen again to Hershman Leeson’s short video portrait, A Commercial for Myself (1978), playing on a loop at the entrance: “We’re becoming obsolete so fast, almost before we do anything,” she says. “But we also have the option of becoming second and third generations of ourselves, which is really exciting in this new electronic era that we’re entering—not only psychically but also biologically.” Fifty years on, it seems we no longer have the option. We do and do not belong to ourselves.
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