For over five decades, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work was something of a secret. The American artist only gained widespread recognition in 2014 at 73 years old, following a career-changing retrospective at ZKM in Karlsruhe. While it’s true that Hershman Leeson, like many emerging women artists, wasn’t taken seriously during her start in the 1960s, a bigger problem was that people didn’t consider what she was doing to be art at all. Years ahead of her time, her experimental media works imagined cyborgs, alter egos and psychosocial machines, investigating the myriad ways technology alters the human experience. While commercial galleries of the day simply wouldn’t entertain her, seen through the eyes of today, much of Hershman Leeson’s work is frighteningly prophetic, employing nascent touchscreens, digital avatars and AI years before they were formally invented. “It’s lucky that culture caught up,” Hershman Leeson tells AnOther today. “They still haven’t caught up to all of it.”