Drake, Nicholas. “The Great White Obsession” (An Interview with Laurie Anderson). Art Papers. 24.1 (2000): 26-7

Adding the visuals means adding a whole other layer of rhythm, for one thing, and then the meaning, for another. I thought of this in the end as making giant paintings. To have all these images and light--lots of surface fun. I had expected Moby Dick to be simpler. But once you start scanning things into the computer and making them move, it becomes hard to stop doing it. It's sort of addictive.

With Melville you never do, because he is so many people. He's just a crowd of one! He writes in so many different voices that when he says, "Call me Ishmael," you think, "Who is this guy?" After he introduces him, you lose him for hundreds of pages. Then Ishmael bobs up at the end as the survivor.

That style of narrative is really really interesting, for him to be switching like that. I really responded to it as a reader. I love things that are told from hundreds of points of view and hundreds of different voices.

That's often what a writer would have to do with a set designer or a visual person. Sometimes those worlds don't collide very well. Sometimes they do, not because they contradict each other, but because they create a certain antagonistic energy.

To write and stage and shoot took a couple of years.
Drake: Is this still performance art to you, as opposed to theater?
Anderson: I never understood what performance art is, you know really. You can describe it by what it's not. It's not a music concert, or... I suppose you could call it that. I'm not really good at categories. With that said, I think that it has a lot more language than the other things that I have done. It's more a play than a concert.

Anderson: I don't think that I will ever try to translate a novel again into a multimedia work. It's very, very difficult. I'm kind of interested in germs right now.