Lynn Hershman Leeson (Cleveland, USA, 1941), a pioneer of multimedia art, has been interested in the relationship between humans and technology since the Seventies, dwelling on the topic of identity and surveillance. Her works appear as those pictures of missing people commonly found on American milk cartons between the Eighties and the Nineties. The portraits are accompanied by the description "Born in 2019", the date of creation of the image using Generative.Photos, an online software that generates pictures of people who do not exist by aggregating images of faces captured in public contexts with methods we often ignore. These pictures are frequently used in commercial contexts, but it is easy to imagine many other – and more dangerous – possible uses.
Lynn Hershman Leeson