FUTURE VISIONS
In her latest exploration of cutting-edge technology, Laurie Anderson shoots for the moon in a spellbinding digital journey
LUNAR LANDING The New York avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson on devising a hi-tech experience that lets the viewer fly to the moon
The artist Laurie Anderson grew up in what she likes to call ‘sky country’. When she played outside as a child, in the village of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, deep in the Midwest of America, she could see the horizon in every direction. It was like being able to look from one end of the Earth to the other, and it gave her a feeling of total freedom, total happiness. ‘I think a lot of people find their most beautiful and ideal landscapes in their childhood,’ she says. ‘For me, that was absolutely true.’
In one of her latest works, To the Moon, Anderson has tried to capture some of that ideal. Shown at the Manchester International Festival in July, the piece is her third virtual-reality (VR) collaboration with the Taiwanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang. To experience it, you wear a headset and connected gloves that manipulate your movements as you’re sent, virtually, into outer space. There, you find yourself suddenly adrift, floating through darkness, planet Earth receding into the distance. When you land on the moon, you see your shadow against the lunar landscape stretching ahead of you. Diagrams of DNA particles rush through the air. Hand-drawn images of things that are endangered or disappearing – a bee, a polar bear, the word ‘DEMOCRACY’ – appear and vanish. An image of a dinosaur dissolves and re-forms into a Cadillac, and there are great mounds of rubbish everywhere. Suddenly, your astronaut-suited body appears to fall away from you, spinning out into space. Just when you think the show might be over, a sequence of numbers amasses and seems to become your new form. The next thing you know, you’re riding on a donkey.
If this all sounds surreal and dreamy, random and inexplicable, then that’s about right. The work is also beautiful: the landscape is monochrome and epic in scale, with a fine dust floating through the sky designed to create a sense of air current and texture. Even though the moon has no atmosphere, Anderson wanted to make the viewer feel her moonscape, ‘because otherwise VR has an eerie lack of depth’.
Anderson has worked with VR for years now, the latest of many technological experiments in her long and varied career. Since the early 1970s, she has made seven studio albums, numerous art films and performance pieces, staged countless exhibitions and been Nasa’s first artist-in-residence. Along the way, she has invented entirely new equipment, such as her ‘tape-bow violin’, which uses recorded magnetic tape instead of horsehair in the bow, and her ‘talking stick’, a wireless instrument that can access and replicate sound. Like any mechanic, she appreciates how things work, their specifications and technicalities. (Anderson’s first date with her late husband, the musician Lou Reed, started off at an Audio Engineering Society Convention.) She likes to take things apart and put them back together again in a different way, transforming them into something new.
Despite this pull to innovation, Anderson insists she is no early adopter, nor is she drawn to working with new media for its own sake. ‘I’m not interested in being the first one to use anything,’ she says. In fact, she holds many digital advances in suspicion. ‘My favourite quote about that is, “If you think technology is going to solve your problems, you don’t understand technology and you don’t understand your problems.”’ Over the years, she has seen artists race to work with some new toy, only to end up with a piece that is more about the machinery than the idea. ‘OK, that was fast, impressive, spectacular – so what?’ she says. ‘That’s what trade shows do.’
Digital media attracts Anderson because it offers an alternative form of storytelling, and the chance to make her audience feel something they haven’t felt before. Technique and meaning should be inseparable, she believes, so she appreciates how VR pushes the viewer into the work, demanding that they use their body to navigate the world in which they find themselves. ‘A lot of people do a kind of internal dancing, either bobbing their heads or moving with their bodies in some way, in empathetic reaction,’ she says. It thrills her, this dance – the idea that the viewers are experiencing this work in their physical selves, not simply watching it happen to someone else. No longer are they remote from the art, behind a rope in a gallery, or at arm’s length from a gilt frame. Nor are they static, but instead somehow released from their typical physical and mental state. ‘When I go down the street in New York, I see most people sort of imprisoned in their bodies,’ says Anderson. ‘They’re walking in this really stilted way and their suits are so tight. They’re just not free… As an artist, my secret and ultimate goal is freedom.’
Freedom can have its complications, however. Virtual reality offers the viewer the chance to choose how they explore the work. They, not the artist, are in charge. ‘For a long time,’ admits Anderson, ‘I really resisted giving people that power.’ Her early performances, whether in visual art or music, were tightly controlled; she knew exactly how she wanted them to be experienced from moment to moment. (For instance, with Duets on Ice, when she would play the violin with her feet in skates frozen into blocks of ice, and only stop playing once the ice had melted, she wanted the audience to make certain connections between what they were seeing and hearing.) Gradually, though, Anderson has learnt to adapt to the loss of control. It feels true to her, especially at the moment, given the state of ‘general collapse’ she identifies in America’s politics and environmental degradation. As the world feels less stable, so her work follows suit.
But Anderson has also grown to appreciate what surrendering power gives to her audience. ‘I just love that people make their own decisions – “Oh, I’m going to skip that part, or I’m going to go ahead and do this and that.”’ Her next major project is a musical VR piece that will come to fruition in a couple of years. In the process, she has had to write off everything she has ever known about composing – structure and forward motion, a sense of a beginning, middle and end. However she chooses to write the music, the listener will be in charge of the order in which they hear it. She has no idea how it will turn out. It’s always the way when she’s at this stage, right in the middle of something new. The work feels vague and unclear, but she doesn’t mind. If anything, she likes to prolong the sense of possibility such uncertainty contains. ‘Things are in a cloud for me for a while,’ she says. ‘Then I wait for the rain to come down and make something a little bit more real.’