Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, making particular use of language, technology, and visual imagery. She became widely more known outside the art world in 1981 when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth5 June 1947
CityGlen Ellyn, IL
CountryUnited States of America
I think illusion is one of the most interesting things that I've found to think about. Just look at yesterday, and what you were doing, and how important it was, and how nonexistent it is now! How dreamlike it is! Same thing with tomorrow. So where are we living?
I'm not usually where I think I am. It's kind of spooky.
I think women are excellent social critics.
Computers are so deeply stupid. What bother me most when they talk about technology is they don't realize how much more exciting their minds are. That machine is stupid. And boring. It does just a few things and then it'll crash. People think, 'I am on the Net, I am in touch with the world'. Wrong! The point is how we work, not how machines work.
I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual.
I think artists who are attracted to working on the Net will adjust their work to the capabilities of a very small screen.
I think a lot of people in Washington are extremely suspicious of NASA.
Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That's a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something.
It's good to take a longer view and think, what would I really like to do if I had no limitations whatsoever?
Not many people care what you do. They care about what you do as much as you care about what they do. Think about it. Just exactly that much. You are not the center of the universe.
Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There's this attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive. We're especially drawn to the power. Many of the images of technology are about making us more powerful, extending what we can do. Unfortunately, 95 percent of this is hype, because I think we're powerful without it.
I see that it has huge benefits for us understanding how and why diversity changes over time and how that might be applied to evaluate potential effects of future environment and climate changes,
The thing that's characteristic of my performance is that I literally do drag the whole studio onto the stage.
You can do bigger and bigger things. For what?