Sone, Yuji. “Sensory Otherness in Laurie Anderson’s Work.” BST (Body, Space, Technology), Vol. 5 (2005). http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol05/yujisone.html.

One’s vision is extended to the temporal gaps operate outside the ordinary system of our perception. Yet, we maintain a sense of coherence when we face them. 3

In Anderson’s case, mediated forms and modes are used to rearrange our sensory systems. 3

[about Burroughs performance]: Instead, the performance generated a kind of dislocation, or an implosion between vision and audition while rendering a mediated reality sensuous—that is to say, literally ‘of the senses.’ 4

Paradoxically, the disembodied informs the ‘liveness’ of the embodied: the technological mediation itself begins to take on life. The performance itself became a kind of live organism. 4

Amelia Jones aptly describes Anderson’s work as creating a ‘technophenomenological body’. 4

Owens argues that the artist is not concerned with ambiguitiy, with multiple meanings engendered by a single sign; rather, two clearly defined but mutually incompatible readings are engaged in blind confrontation in such a way that it is impossible to chose between them. 4

In the violin piece in Home of the Brave, Burroughs’s voice changes its tone according to how fast Anderson moves the recording tape violin bow. His voice is sometimes recognisable and sometimes not. It moves between enunciation and enunciated, listening and hearing. The writer’s voice is a signifier disconnected from the real referent, Burroughs, and pasted to a different referent, Anderson. It is experienced as an undecidable identity between the two. Anderson’s performance problematises the unity of identity in relation to a sensory ‘gestalt.’ 5

[quoting Jestrovic, writing about Heteroglossia] ‘the totality of a work is expressed as a combination of author’s voice, the speeches of the narrators and characters, and the included genres’ (2000: 2 and 7 n 17) 5

[L.A]: I’m probably just a regular schizophrenic. 5

Anderson, however, not only cuts and pastes her own memories and experiences into a story, but also the memories of others—‘she has been known to adapt the stories of others and present them as the experience of the ‘I’ who speaks in her performances’ 6 [17 Howell, John. Laurie Anderson. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press (1992)].

The self is revealed to be constructed by unreliable and changeable components, including memory. Anderson gives her audience an experience of being lost in the world they live in, felt as a hollow in the self, that is, an ‘inside otherness.’ This sense of inside otherness works through overlaps, splices, and mis-readings at the edge of our perceptual and cognitive abilities. Questions around this kind of productivity at the sensory periphery, where it contacts, merges with, and is defined by its environment, could hep to explore a new model for analysis of technologically mediated performance and its engagement with ‘the Other.’ 7