Infamous performance artist weilding technology and occasionally targetting gender identity.
http://twist.lib.uiowa.edu/vidcult/Anderson.html
Laurie Anderson
Called "America's multi-mediatrix" by Wired magazine, Laurie Anderson is a performance artist as well as musician, poet, writer, and visual artist who is best known for her unusual melange of music, art, and the spoken word. As a conceptual artist, one of Laurie Anderson's more interesting strategies is streaming innumerable pictures and words--in the form of video and film clips and slide projections--across a large-scale screen that frames her performance. The viewer is thus inundated with images. "I use technology as a way of amplifying or changing things," she has said, including her Durm Suit, a percussive outfit with elctronic drum sensors sewn into its seams, which produces a big boom whenever she taps her knee or chest or makes an expansive movement. On stage, custom built microphones, along with pitch-shifting black boxes, re-gender her voice, transforming her persona from female to male. Anderson is especially fond of neon bows and violins that glow in the dark, all of which become for her a kind of "audio mask" and a way of reflecting on the inherent maleness of high technology and the media world. Anderson does not deconstruct technology so much as expose its mystifying practices to irony.
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/anderson/card1.html#
"United States I-IV," 1983. Eight hour, multimedia performance; premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Anderson.html
Laurie Anderson | Zero Gravity | 1995
Multi-disciplinary artist Laurie Anderson was trained as a fine artist, sculptor and painter, but her work spilled into dance, music and performance art. At the focal point she is a poet who builds multimedia textures around her words.
In 1983 she completed her first large theatrical scale work, United States, a 4-part multimedia performance of song-texts. Bringing together a unique blend of spoken word, large scale projections (in collaboration with media artist Perry Hoberman), keyboards, microphone (delivering her voice through her trademark sound effects), quirky movement, Cheshire smile, and sly eye contact.
In 1995 she explored the interactive medium, creating the CD-ROM Puppet Motel in collaboration with multimedia artist Hsin-Chien Huang. Puppet Motel is divided into 32 rooms, small vignettes based on previous works and trademark Anderson motifs: clock, airplane, plug socket, telephone, and other objects of technology. Puppet Motel is a new form of music-theater where the audience is on stage, controlling the flow of time and space in zero gravity.
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/articles/2002/06/anderson/anderson3.html
photos
