Anderson, Laurie

1947–

Performance Artist

American performance artist and “techno-storyteller” Laurie Anderson has long been recognized as a pioneer of new media in the arts. Embracing everything from voice-altering Vocoders in the 1970s to CD-ROMs and the Internet in the 1990s, Anderson has consistently been active in groundbreaking creative media. Yet beneath her love of technology lies the profound conviction that it is people who make art, not corporate society or machines.

Born in Chicago on June 5, 1947, Laurie Anderson was a keen violinist as a child, and played with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for several years. Doubting she could make the grade as a professional, however, she gave up at the age of 16 and began studying library science instead. Majoring in art history, she graduated magna cum laude from Barnard in 1969 before earning a master's in sculpture from Columbia University in 1972. Later she taught art history at colleges in New York City, coloring her lectures with improvised fantasy stories, which she now admits “had nothing to do with anything I'd ever read in art history books.”

Frequently described as “experimental,” “avantgarde,” or just plain “quirky,” Anderson was interested [Page 7]in marrying art and technology—however crude—right from the start. Her first performance piece, Automotive, which premiered in 1972, was a symphony of car drivers honking their horns and slamming their doors. In her 1973 work O-Range, megaphones were used to shout stories across an empty sports stadium. In 1974, she invented her “self-playing violin” (with internal audio speaker). A partnership with audio engineer Bob Bielecki spawned other unusual instruments, including the 1975 Viophonograph (a violin mounted on a record turntable that moves the bow) and the 1976 tape-bow violin (which she plays by passing a prerecorded audio tape, strung across a bow, over a tape player's audio heads, which are mounted in place of the violin strings). Around the same time, Anderson began to experiment with Super-8 film, the inexpensive forerunner of amateur video, for recording her stories and songs. A true multimedia artist long before the term was invented, she was soon producing photography, stories and songs, and installations, as well as the performance pieces for which she is perhaps still best known, touring widely throughout the United States and Europe.

Laurie Anderson. (Neal Preston/CORBIS)

At the end of the 1970s, Anderson's piece Americans on the Move, a 90-minute meditation on transportation, involved her first use of a voice-altering synthesizer called a Vocoder. Along with the Synclavier, the first sound-sampling synthesizer, the Vocoder featured prominently in her later works, including the apocalyptic talking opera United States. This work included a haunting, hypnotic, eight-minute song called “O Superman,” released in 1981 as a single by Warner Brothers; it became an international hit record and rose to number two in the British pop charts, later appearing on Anderson's Big Science album.

Sudden fame gave Anderson the opportunity to develop United States into a four-part eight-hour work, which she performed throughout Europe and the United States in 1983. She recorded and toured extensively for the remainder of the decade, and she also collaborated with a number of artists noted for [Page 8]their creative use of technology, including English musicians Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno, with whom she planned to build a theme park in Spain.

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