Lynn Hershman is one of the most influential media artists o four times. With a creative outputrangingfrom theearlyconceptual works and performances to photo-collages and videotapes, from TV and film productions to interactive installations, her work cannot be reduced to a single genre. This oeuvre, which won the artist the 1995 Media Art Prize awarded by Siemens and ZKM Karlsruhe, signalizes a concept o f strategies to break downbarriersbetweendifferentmediaaswell asapioneering,experimentalInvestigation Into new technologies. Hershman believes in the potentials o f media but links these with piercing questions about gender and identity, history and media reality. Women are a recurrent focus in her work, but the approach goes far beyond the articulation o f feminist thesis. Her central themes are the body and the image o f the body, critique o f media representation in general, and the constructions underlyingourwaysofperceiving.Hershman likes to divide her creative periods into„B.C." (Before Computers) and„A.D.“ (After Digital). The possible implications for her work o f this semi-ironical categorization can serve as a red thread for navigating through a network ofverydifferentproducts.Thistwo-part presentationwillinitiallybededicatedtoworks able to be bundled together under the rubric „Concepts-Performances-Interactivit/'.The secondpart will concentrate on Hershman's videotapesandherdiscoveryofvideoasan „alternative space": — „As video was finding its language, I was finding m y voice. " From theearlyworkofthelate 1970s,throughout the„electronic diaries" kept over 10years o f the two decades that followed, and up to the latest TVproductions, she has succeeded in working in a space between documentation andmis-en-misscène,betweenherown historyand thatofothers.Thepastfewyears have been extremelyproductive for Hershman. As her work has gained increasing recognition, especially In Europe, she has grasped opportunities to realize more elaborate projects with the backing o f TVbroadcasters (ZDFand ARTE) as well as museums. Her own biography has retreated further into the background to afford space for wider research into the implications o f technological and socialdevelopments.Thepresentation will conclude with a look a t the artistic deployment o f new production methods for her first feature film „Conceiving Ada", which is due to be premiered a t the Berlin Film Festival. „ The Making of...“ occasions a trip back into the 19thcenturyonthebasisofthestoryof AdaLovelace,who wasLordByron'sdaughter and an inspired mathematician whose ideas foreshadowedcomputerprogrammingofany kind. It is not easy to summarize a quarter- centuryofartproduction,especiallywhen the works in question are site-specific, volatile installation art, conceptual performances or events documented in equally transient form, e.g. „The Floating Museum", a collaborative project carried out with fellow-artists like Cindy Sherman or Gordon Matta-Oark. Why exactlyis„Lomafafirstinteractiveartists'video­ discdatingfrom 1983,stillworthseeingand showing?Worksintentonproducing effects while investigating new media technologies often tend to have an accelerated half-life period. This problem becomes clear to all those who find themselves helplessly fiddling about with certain interactive installations solelyin order to stimulate some audio-visual reaction from a programme. Viewers o f Hershman's work are unlikely to fidget; on the contrary, the effect o fher recurrent and criticalconfrontation with the viewer's position is mesmerizing. Dante Hotel; Commercials For New York Hotel Rooms; Roberta; Breitmore; The Floating Museum; 25 Windows At Bonwitteller; Test; Patterns; Lorna; First Person Plural, Video Diary; Longshot; Seeing Is Believing; Desire Inc; Room of One's Own; Seduction Of A Cyborg; America's Finest; Paranoid Mirror; Clicking In; Conceiving Ada; The Making Of 'conceiving Ada'