Isobel Harbison: When making your diary-format project First Person Plural, the Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson between 1984 to 1996, the central work of your recent exhibition curated by Anna Gritz and Cathrin Mayer at KW Institute in Berlin, did you have a particular audience or viewing architectures in mind?

Lynn Hershman Leeson: I had neither, only an urgency to speak and an ambition to learn the language of video. I had no idea they would ever be shown or broadcast.

IH: Were there any specific events that triggered First Person Plural or did it respond to a more generalized sense of unease? At the time you made this work, surveys conducted between 1983 and 1984 revealed how North Americans were experiencing new surveillance consciousness and screen paranoia, an alertness that your work has constantly played upon…