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  • Laurie AndersonTelling Stories in Virtual Reality
  • Laurie Anderson and Bonnie Marranca (bio)

As a performer, visual artist, composer, poet, and filmmaker, Laurie Anderson has been at the forefront in using technology in the arts since the beginning of her career more than four decades ago. Works such as United States I-V (1983), The Nerve Bible (1995), Homeland (2008), Delusion (2010), and Habeas Corpus (2015) variously encompass storytelling, invented instruments, animation, installation, film and electronic media, and music. In 2002, Anderson became the first artist-in-residence at NASA, reflecting her long-time interest in science and outer space. Her recent activity includes Landfall, a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet; a new book, All the Things I Lost in the Flood; worldwide exhibitions and artist residencies, the latest at Home of the Arts, Gold Coast, Australia. Her new virtual reality work, The Chalkroom (made with Hsin-Chien Huang) is on view through 2018 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, along with another VR piece for headphones, Aloft, and her large-scale drawings Lolabelle in the Bardo. Lolabelle, Anderson's beloved dog, inspired her recent film Heart of a Dog. The Chalkroom received the award for Best Virtual Reality Experience at the 74th Venice International Film Festival (2017). This interview was taped on May 1, 2018.

It's a long arc from the magnetic tape on the violin bow in the 1970s to the virtual reality of Chalkroom. How much does your work evolve in relation to available technologies?

I tend to gravitate towards new things just to try them out, see how they work. And if they can do something that I'm interested in, I'll try working with them. If they can't, I try not to do it just for the sake of doing something new. The glitzy box has some appeal to me, I have to admit. But when I first started working with VR when my collaborator asked me to do it, I said, "No, I don't want to do it." Because it's such an unpleasant visual language. It's bright, flat, it's also very oriented to gaming structures. I thought, I have no interest in this. Keeping score has never been my forte. I said, "Not really, unless, I can make it very homemade [End Page 37] and very dusty and full of stuff." We kind of invented a language that's a very atmospheric visual language. That made it possible for me to work in it.

How did you and the Chinese media artist Hsin-Chien Huang start working together on the piece?

He was my collaborator on Puppet Motel in the mid-nineties.

Oh, I've got that piece.

It is not playable on anything anymore, but anyway. It was in the mid-nineties. There was a company called Voyager, and that was Bob Stein's company. He basically decided to publish electronic work of artists. We'd been waiting for that. He began to do the work of Bill Viola and a bunch of other video artists. It didn't take off because people didn't want to have that at home. That was a bet that just didn't pay off. But, in the meantime, I did this CD-ROM. Same thing. It just didn't happen in that world. But we had a really wonderful time making Puppet Motel, and then we also made some other things in the late nineties. We've worked together every once in a while over the last few years.

Did you collaborate while in different cities? Were you working on different aspects of the technology and the drawing?

Well, he came to New York and we did things here in the 1990s. Now, we work on Skype, which is a really wonderful way to work on ideas. Once in a while, he comes here, or I come there. So, it's a really nice collaboration, you know. We get a lot done.

In my mind, I had usually identified the virtual reality experience as the flat, cold screen of video gaming, which didn't interest me. But I thought Chalkroom was a more appealing experience because it was...

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