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

Auslander, Philip. “Intellectual Property Meets the Cyborg: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Technology.” Performing Arts Journal. 14.1 (1992): 30-42.

Early in the film [Home of the Brave], Anderson appears masked, lecturing the audience in a digitally synthesize ‘male’ voice. The subjects of her lecture are the digits ‘0’ and ‘1.’ She points out that in common discourse, these signs have opposite meanings: to be ‘number one’ is at the other end of the spectrum from being a ‘zero.’ She suggests that this way of using signs needs to be reformed, because the distance between the highest and lowest, between ‘0’ and ‘1,’ leaves ‘very little room…for everybody else. Just not enough range.’ She proposes that we should abandon the value judgments associated with these signs and recognize them as of equal value because they are equally the building blocks of the modern computer age. Anything that can be expressed in words or numbers, in any language, can be communicated using this simple, foolproof system. It’s all here in a nutshell—the entire alphanumerical system, A to Z, the zero to infinity of digital intelligence.

She then gives examples of letters, numbers, and a musical phrase expressed as digital combinations, zeroes and ones filling the projection screen behind her. As she concludes, she counts off a two-beat rhythm (‘and zero—and one’). Projections of a large zero and large one alternate behind her, accompanied by a metallic, rasping sound. 37

In this section of her performance, Anderson not only describes the leveling of cultural binaries implicit within the epstimology of digital technology, but enacts it. The figure we see before us displays both male and female signs, yet ultimately is neither. It is also a cyborg, a human being whose voice is produced by the very digital technology it describes for us. This figure claims to have written the song from which Anderson extracts her example of binary code: the irony may be that the cyborg, the amalgam of human and machine, truly is the composer in this case, as Anderson used a computer in composing the song. 37-38

The passage is comic in that the lecturer’s hyperbole and the seeming inefficiency of expressing a simple number, letter or musical note as a huge number of ones and zeroes appear somewhat ridiculous, yet underlying this gently deflating humor is the suggestion of the deep technological utopia Haraway has in mind. Computer logic cannot abolish binaries—it cannot exist without them—yet those binaries imply no value judgments; unlike the societies and cultures it has had such an impact on, digital technology itself is genuinely indifferent to the differences between the terms of the binaries it employs.

Through the mediation of electronics, Anderson’s and Burroughs’s voices merge: the voice that emerges from the tape-bow violin is his, yet it is not. It is her ‘voice’ in that she plays the instrument, yet it is not her voice. He ‘authored’ the sentence by speaking it, yet she wrote the words and actually controls the articulation of the spoken text with her bow. The homosexual-junkie-misogynist-Beat novelist, and the heterosexual-feminist-postmodernist entertainer-performance artist achieve a strange and unstable unity of the kind described by Haraway for the duration of the song by speaking through a single voice that belongs to both, yet to neither. 40

Her work reflects a provisional glimpse of the cultural environment that will become possible if new technologies are indeed permitted to realize their potential as ‘technologies of freedom.’ 41

McKenzie, Jon. “Laurie Anderson for Dummies”. The Drama Review. 41.2 (1997): 30-50.

Second, she plugs her electric body into corporations, here specifically, Warner Bros. Records, HarperCollins, and Voyager, who mass produce her work and in turn plug her through various media blitzes. Through such corporate bodies, she thus links up with the language game of bureaucratic performance: profitability and reengineerings. The twists of her work lie in the path she cuts across these three terrains of performance: cultural, technological, and bureaucratic. 31

it’s because Anderson has described The Nerve Bible as a ‘retrospective of the future.’ 33

Philip Auslander has written that Anderson, unlike performance artists of the 1960s, does not seek to transgress the emerging electronic order from some external location; rather, her works resist that order by inhabiting it (1992)…Resistance in electronic space is less about taking and maintaining a physical or logical position outside of power and more about playing multiple language games in order to learn a variety of moves, to point out the different rules governing them, and to invent new ones when necessary. From “Lower Mathematics”: “I think we should get rid of the value judgments attached to these two numbers and recognize that to be a zero is no better, no worse, than to be number one. Because what we are actually looking at here are the building blocks of the Modern Computer Age” (1994a:135). 38

[quoting Lyotard]:

There are many lanuage games—a heterogeneity of language particles. They only give rise to institutions in patches […]. The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their matrices are commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. (1984:xxiv) (Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.)

Rapaport, Herman. “‘Can You Say Hello?’: Laurie Anderson’s United States. Theatre Journal. 38.3, Performance of Textual History (1986): 339-354.

She suggests that in a postmodern culture scientists are so overspecialized that when it comes to basic questions they are enormously obtuse. No one has noticed that saying ‘hello’ is exactly the same as saying ‘good-bye,’ that even if aliens could read our signs, they would be confused. The fallacy of science: ‘let x = x,’ the ‘united state.’ 340

Indeed, the whole of United States can be read, watched, and listened to as an analysis of how communication is determined by the conditions of postmodern space. In this sense, Anderson undertakes an anthropological project which attempts to define postmodern consciousness in terms of how communication is subordinated to an artistic frame of reference, a framework within which the question of how things are situated in space becomes of greatest importance. 340

Like Brecht, Anderson is not rigid about final versions of her work, and United States is very much a collage of music, words, and pictures which the performer can change at will without really disturbing the overall scheme. 342

Instead of styles which show a capacity for development and growth, the postmodern displays little more than resonance or the power of evocation, what Fredric Jameson considers the commodification of the unconscious…Anderson notices space less as an area in which to be confined than as a surface to be crossed. 343

For Anderson is more receptive (less modernist) to the fact that our conversations and intimate encounters are patterned on a mode of inhabiting space which has much in common with transitional states of consciousness, with a traveling consciousness. Our conversations resemble travel on an expressway, where we are always suddenly encountering signs indicating entrances, exits, continuations, turn offs, detours, mergings, speed signs, and so on. 345

To make telephone calls, therefore, is to establish something close to radar contact with other entities, a notion reflected in Anderson’s fascination with airplanes, missiles, and spacecraft. We are ourselves but vehicles that not only cross space but are monitored; hence the answering machine in “New York Social Life” as a monitoring device which fulfills a primary condition of postmodern communication: to make contact and check in. Conversation itself is superfluous. For in a postmodern world it is through tracking that we affirm our niche in a community always on the move, and our attachments, obligations, and sympathies are only ways of facilitating the kinds of contact needed to perform a map of social relations. Feelings, concerns, issues, and information become what dogs often are for people: excuses to open and close conversations. They are merely “switches.” 346

Performance art itself is but the re-enactment of this mapping or ‘drawing’ of relations. 346

In this sacrifice of definition, Anderson gains freedom and ambiguity which allows her to be many things in many places while as contact always remaining minimally the same. It is in this sense that she ‘deconstructs’ the border between identity and difference, that she appears as something at once determinate and interdeterminate. 347

One accedes to become “Pac Man,” for example, and in large part Anderson’s United States is a long meditation about how such reductions are performed or imitated. 348

Anderson’s work becomes strangely allied with mass culture. She herself accedes to an authoritarian system of cultural production by disseminating her work through Warner Brothers and Harper and Row…In doing so Anderson ‘performs’ the hegemony’s illusory unifications and subtly reveals its dissonances and discrepancies, but without necessarily enacting a critical stance of her own, a stance which would be recovered merely as another ideological or theoretical formation intended to dominate a field of relationships. 348

Anderson’s work is not part of a historical forgetting, but is an attempt to describe accurately through pastiche how the articulation of vernacular and elite cultures manages to suture the historical subject. 353

Gordon, Mel. “Laurie Anderson: Performance Artist”. The Drama Review. 24.2, Women and Performance Issue (1980): 51-54.

During the summer of 1972, Anderson and a friend organized a performance event in a small Vermont town. Every Sunday evening, residents of Rochester would drive up to their park in automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles to hear music played by a local band. Without ever leaving their car seats, the spectators would sit and honk their horns to show approval at the end of each section. Enthralled by the naiveté and sophistication of the situation, Anderson managed to reverse the audience/entertainer relationship by forming an orchestra of the same vehicles. This time the people in the driver’s seats made the music with their horns and spectators sat in the park’s gazebo. 52

Goldberg, Rose Lee. “Laurie Anderson’s Rhythmic Eye”. Aperture. 160 (2000): 66-71.

But these are not films, although the projections are movie-screen-sized, and sometimes contain film footage. Performances such as Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (1999) or Empty Places (1989-90), with such unforgettable musical material as "Strange Angel" and "Hiawatha," include a collection of continuously changing pictures that are orchestrated, nowadays, by banks of computers and computerized projectors crammed with slides, animation drawings, and film and video footage.

“the tyranny of the rectangle”

The endless stream of visuals, which are also a mix of words and ideograms, hand-drawn stick figures and floating letters, do not illustrate the music so much as lead it. They provide the basic beat of a work--"your eyes are the rhythm section," she says--and force viewers to watch closely: one of her goals is for image and music to be read exactly on a par.

She is intensely aware of her body both as a screen--how it stops and bends light--and as a projector--how shadows bounce off of her.

"Photography," she says, "is just another way of using light."

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.

Chua, Eu Jin. “Laurie Anderson’s Telepresence.” Postmodern Culture. 16.2 (2006). (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/toc/pmc16.2.html).

Anderson herself does not speak as such--rather, she speaks through alter egos, usually technologically generated, who ventriloquize her stories and anecdotes. 1

Anderson, a classically trained violinist, has said that, in her performances, "the violin is the perfect alter ego. It's the instrument closest to the human voice . . . I've spent a lot of time trying to teach the violin to talk" (Stories 33). 1

that the list of Anderson's alter egos could be expanded to include her policy of performing shows in the local native language when touring non-English-speaking countries--even when completely ignorant of the meaning of the words that issue from her mouth, thus effectively ventriloquizing herself through the mediation of a translator. 1

The circuitous route from written words, to translation, to enunciation by a speaker not fluent in the language of the resulting translation, seems to emphasize the constitutive self-estrangement of the speaking subject. Here language speaks the subject rather than the other way around. Anderson's alter egos speak through her uncannily: "She is the medium which so many incorporeal voices require in order to communicate with us, the body they temporarily assume" (Owens 123). 2

--"doing a performance without being there"--meant that a key element of "performance art" as such was attenuated. After all, one of the most important notional definitions of performance is that it is predicated on the presence of both performer and audience in a particular time and particular space, on the embodied immediacy of the performance event, on "live gestures" (Goldberg, Performance Art 7). Peggy Phelan's is perhaps the most sustained and unequivocal articulation of this definition of performance: "Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance" (146). According to such a definition, At the Shrink's can hardly be said to have been a performance. It was simply a played-back recording of a prior event, absorbed already into a system of reproduction, with the would-be singularity and immediacy of the original event mitigated. 4

By projecting the recording onto a three-dimensional form as opposed to a flat screen, it is understood that an effort is made to amplify the ostensibly attenuated "reality" of the film image. Better than a film projection, Anderson's storyteller squarely took up space. The projected figure bulged into three-dimensions--less a projection than a manifestation, more present than a two-dimensional image yet less so than a solid live body. 4

Yet, as we have already seen, the use of technologically or performatively generated alter egos in Anderson's performances undoes any sense that the mode of address in these events is direct, singular and immediate. Anderson's performative surrogates--her synthesized voices, her ventriloquist's dummy, her video clones--insert a gap between the audience and the would-be authenticity and immediacy of the performer's persona. Moreover, many of her songs and anecdotes take this very gap as their subject matter. Thus in the apostrophic device of the song "O Superman," a mother speaks to her absent daughter through an answering machine. 5

Craig Owens noted that although Anderson is physically present on stage in these shows, "she interrupts the fantasy of copresence that links performer and spectator by interposing electronic media between them" (123). 5

but they could also be understood as an effect of the constitutive estrangement that arises out of the subject's dependence on the mechanical, the technological, or (in a word) the symbolic. After all, when the fantasy of singular self-presence is ruptured, what we get is degrees of otherness--doubles and doppelgangers. 6

[on Dal Vivo]: The title, Dal Vivo, Italian for "live" (as in "live telecast"), played on the multiple meanings of the word--life-like, life-size, live. Also "life sentence." For the subject of this "fake hologram" was not Anderson this time but--significantly and extraordinarily--an inmate at a high security prison, convicted of "aggravated homicide," among other crimes, and sentenced to remain there for much of the rest of his life.[4] A camera picked up the image of the man sitting in his cell in the San Vittore prison several miles away and transmitted it into the darkened exhibition space of the Prada Foundation in Milan where the work was installed. The prisoner, one Santino Stefanini, understood his participation in the installation as a "virtual escape" (and indeed he was selected, out of all other candidates for the job, at least partly owing to the fact that this conception of the installation as "virtual escape" was important to Anderson's own conception of her project) (Anderson, "Some Backgrounds" 31). 7

The technological basis of Dal Vivo may be simply that of television, but, in the combination of liveness with material heft, it is an exaggeration of television. It exaggerates the capacity of the televisual image to produce bodies that are, as it were, in two places at the same time. (8)

The transgressing of the rule that circumscribes all bodies--the rule that says that it is physically impossible to be in two places at the same time--would seem to account for much of the uncanniness of the installation. 8

The point of Dal Vivo, then, is to give "a living body to a statue," as Celant claims ("Miracle in Milan" 20), to animate and quicken to life, in the manner of the rabbi and his Golem or Pygmalion and his Galatea, a thing characterized by the opacity and stasis of death. 9

Thus, in Dal Vivo, when such a paradoxically deathly electronic image is projected on a moribund lump of clay that is an ultimately futile simulacrum of life, what we have is absences piled up on absences. 9

At another level however, the reality is that the prisoner doesn't lift a finger to accomplish this jailbreak--it is a completely passive transgression, and its result is simply the lodging of a reproduction of the prisoner's body in yet another claustrophobic and restrictive space, that of the gallery. The statue becomes a live body, but conversely, the live body is petrified into the condition of a statue. The experience for the prisoner of participating in the installation brings out this contradiction--to virtually escape, he has to sit more still than ever. 10

If we were to ignore our reading of Anderson's prisoner as passive and lacking, and instead emphasize his vigour and potential--his technologically-aided liberation from the forces that imprison him--what we might get is a kind of techno-utopianism. Tele-technologies, so used, have the potential to liberate bodies from their messy and undesirable corporeal limitations so that they can accomplish the heretofore physically impossible (so the logic might go). 11

In Anderson's unnerving scenario, tele-technology produces not pure unmediated intimacy, but rather a profound blockage. While Ascott's "telenoic" subject is transcendently disembodied, Anderson's prisoner's body is disabled rather than sublimated (his mobility is severely delimited for the duration of his spectral appearance in the gallery). While Ascott's subject is sensorily and perceptually enhanced, Anderson's prisoner is deprived of sensory power (he can't see or hear the place into which he is projected). While Ascott's subject is supposedly energized by the potential for perfect intersubjective communication, Anderson's prisoner lacks all capacity for speech and communication; in the gallery he is effectively deaf and dumb, a subject turned into a spectacular and impenetrable object, isolated and fetishized as such. 15

then the equation with Dal Vivo suggests that the prisoner exhibited in such a way is also a hapless subject caught in the gaze of scientific--or in this case, penal--power. The situation to which Anderson submits the prisoner reiterates the disciplinary power to which he is already subjected every day through incarceration, surveillance, and regimentation--with the inflection that the institution that now holds him in thrall is not only the penal, but also the aesthetic. Thus, in the companion monograph to Anderson's installation, we find constant references to Foucault's concept of disciplinary power. A quote from Discipline and Punish is spread across two pages in large boldface (Celant, Laurie Anderson 44-5). 19

[Derrida quote] "As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. . . . [B]ecause we know that, once it has been taken, captured, this image will be reproducible in our absence, because we know this already, we are already haunted by this future, which brings our death" (Echographies 117). 21

In addition, owing to the permutation of the tele-technological mechanism, the gallery-goers are always aware of the prisoner's presence (after all, he is right there on display), whereas the prisoner, blind and deaf, cannot know whether he is being observed at any one time--which is of course the very definition of panopticism. 23

Dal Vivo represents the mediatized heteronomy of the modern subject (perhaps the primary theme of Anderson's entire oeuvre) by including in its performance event not just technology or self-reflexive language, but a living being (moreover, a living being who is already in a state of proscription). 32

In the act of opening up for critique a relationship of power and subjecthood, Anderson becomes complicit in that which she would critique. 32