A trickster, a mechanic of seduction, and cyber-clone, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s video work represents her prolific and highly innovative practice across sixty years. T.A.P.E. is delighted to celebrate her work as part of the exhibition Deep Fake - an expansive showcase of her career at Hoffman Donahue.

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The first program centers around Hershman Leeson's manipulation of analog video towards a feminist techo-consciousness. Ever participatory and playful, these works break the passive fantasy of the screen, the cathode-ray-tube buzzing with sensuous and biting invitation. It's easy to be drawn to her hypnotic universe of women appearing inside of, gazing at, and touching the screen - television and computer - as lush and living electrostatic impulses.

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In this first program, we are excited to present four shorts -Seduction of a Cyborg (1994),  Desire, Inc. (1990), The Making of the Rough and (Very) Incomplete Videodisk on the Life of Marcel Duchamp (1984), and Test Patterns (1979).

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Like her feature films Conceiving Ada (1997) and Teknolust (2002), Seduction of a Cyborg (1994) explores a feminist critique of artificial intelligence, with a deeply enfleshed view of the creation-destruction of the woman-computer form. She narrativizes the alienation underlying techno-humanism, but with a refusal to reject technology outright, forming an instinctively empathetic vision of the cyborg present. To a point, Hershman Leeson works on the cutting edge of media technologies. Most notably, she was the first artist to create an interactive film on laser-disk. Her deconstructive experiments with interactive laserdisc are documented in The Making of the Rough and (Very) Incomplete Videodisk on the Life of Marcel Duchamp (1984).  

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Throughout her work, Hershman Leeson makes a never-ending farce of the line between reverie and reality.Desire, Inc. (1990), makes seduction its most bare and renders consumptive urges ridiculous.Test Patterns (1979), shatters the ordered passiveness of television broadcast and invites an examination of popular media. Shared cultural memory is on the slab, ready for dissection.

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We are excited to present these four shorts, with pre-recorded conversation to follow with Lynn Hershman Leeson and technology journalist Joanne McNeill. McNeill's non-fiction Lurking historicizes the tension between spectatorship and participation at the rise of the social internet, giving shape and narrative to the feeling of being online. Her most recent project, Wrong Way, is a novel about living inside techno-futurist corporate ideology and reckoning with its unbearably oxymoronic nature.

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Tuesday, 2/10
7:30 DOORS
8:00 SCREENING

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DEEP FAKE at Hoffman Donahue is open from January 29 to March 14, 2026. Marking her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in 40 years, Deep Fake surveys Lynn Hershman Leeson’s six-decade career, bringing together works from her iconic series Phantom Limb, Breathing Machines, Roberta Breitmore, and Hero Sandwich, alongside never-before-seen early drawings, rare video works, and newly manipulated photographs. Hoffman Donahue, 427 N Camden Dr., 90210

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Electronic Arts Intermix is a distributor of cutting edge video art, representing some of the most evocative and provocative voices of the past century. Since its founding in 1971 it has supported distribution, exhibition, and preservation of over 5,000 video works.

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Special thanks to Karl McCool of Electronic Arts Intermix, Bridget Donahue and Alexander Fulmer of Hoffman Donahue, Joanne McNeil, and Lynn Hershman Leeson.

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Presented by T.A.P.E. - a Los Angeles based 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to facilitating support for analog media through free digitizing, education, hands-on training, equipment rentals and volunteer opportunities. Teach, archive, preserve, exhibit.‍

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Whammy! is located in the REAR unit of 2514 Sunset Blvd, entrance access is via Rampart Blvd.