America's Finest (1990–1994)

With America’s Finest, Lynn Hershman Leeson developed an interactive media artwork in the early 1990s centering on an M16 rifle. The work addresses the violence of weapons and how it is portrayed in the media. The view through the sighting device of the M16 – the rifle used by the US Army in the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf wars – shows the exhibition space overlaid with video recordings of war scenes. The artist here references Étienne-Jules Marey’s historic chronophotographic gun of 1882, in which he replaced the bullets with a film roll.

Hershman Leeson goes a step further, projecting video images of visitors taken by a sensor-controlled camera into the sight of the M16. As such, visitors find themselves in the field of fire they have chosen – and in a paradoxical predicament in which they can be clearly classified neither as perpetrators nor as victims. In »America’s Finest«, the latent violence through identity politics and surveillance technologies that pervade Hershman Leeson’s oeuvre becomes explicit violence. Although fiction and reality overlap, visitors are confronted with the reality of their own media interventions.