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In The Roberta Breitmore Series, 1974–1978, the character Roberta Breitmore, created in 1972, moves and reproduces herself like a ghostly double of Hershman Leeson. Roberta appears as a character in films or as a real person at exhibition openings. She meets with men on dates, wanders onto the Golden Gate Bridge or becomes a victim of exorcist ritual. Roberta’s performances are documented various formats: photographs, posters or newspaper advertisements, videos, eyewitness accounts, art criticism, etc. We can communicate with Roberta in cyberspace through a puppet with her features or meet her in the virtual world of Second Life.

“Roberta was at once artificial and real. A non-person, the gene of the anti-body, Roberta’s first live action was to place an ad in a local newspaper for a roommate. People who answered the ad became participants in her adventure. As she became part of their reality, they became part of her fiction. I wanted Roberta to extend beyond appearance into a symbol that used gesture and expression to reveal the basic truth of character. […] Many people assumed I was Roberta. Although I denied it at the time and insisted that she was ‘her own woman’, with defined needs, ambitions and instincts, in retrospect, I feel we were linked. Roberta represented part of me as surely as we all have within us an underside, a dark, shadowy cadaver that we try with pathetic illusion to camouflage…” (Lynn Hershman Leeson)