| CINTERNATIONAL FILM FORUM |
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presents "Conceiving Ada" directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson |
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Along similar lines, there is director Lynn Hershman Leeson's selection of Timothy Leary as Emmy's mentor. Leary appears eerily otherworldly, even while he is still "alive", as he appears as an outsized video image, rather like god up in the sky. The story as well as the techniques behind it are marvelously entertaining. |
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Copyright 1998
Cinternational |
CONCEIVING
ADA USA, 1997, directed or created by Lynn Hershman Leeson
who is a new media artist and electronic arts professor at the University
of California at Davis. The film is about Ada Lovelace, the allegedly
prodigiously sexual and equally prodigiously intellectually gifted
daughter of romantic poet Lord Byron. As Toronto programmer Kay
Armatage states, (Lovelace) is considered by some to have invented
the first computer program in 1843, when she foresaw the possibilities
of artificial intelligence for the "analytic engine," a British
mechanical precursor to the electronic computer. But CONCEIVING
ADA is not a period piece by any means. Director Lynn Hershman
Leeson intertwines the past with the present by way of nothing less
than DNA strands! Ada's story is relayed by way of a contemporary
woman computer programmer who invents new digitalization functions
for the purpose of reconstructing Ada's life. 
The
contemporary programmer, Emmy, creates an artificial life agent
(indistinguishable, really, from a virtual agent), to retrieve information
from the past about Ada Lovelace. Emmy's involvement becomes partly
evolutionary, the evolution of the two-in-one entities.