“Roberta Breitmore” by Lynn Hershman Leeson (1970-present)

Pioneering new media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson created a complex and fully established false identity as a longterm performance work that fully enveloped her life.  “Roberta Breitmore” was both a physical transformation as well as an experiment in documents, actors, legal arrangements, and the very foundations of identity.  Beginning by emptying her wallet upon leaving the Dante Hotel in the desert,a new identity was forged with false certificates, wigs, make up and new character attributes. She later hired three doubles to impersonate her as clones, wearing the same costume.  They were revealed several years later, during an exorcism at the grave of Lucrezia Borgia.  The project was manifested soley in interactions that consume the every day life of anyone, though documented through a fictive identity.  Later, in the later 1990’s, she became a interactive artificially intelligent web persona in both Second Life and through other social media.