Laurie Anderson has always sounded like the future. Ever since she scored a global hit in 1981 with ‘O Superman’, the New York based artist has been at the cutting edge of melding her music, words and performances with the latest technology.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Anderson has embraced Artificial Intelligence in I’ll Be Your Mirror, her hi-tech exhibition that arrives in Adelaide after premiering in Stockholm in 2023. While Anderson won’t be present physically during the exhibition’s run, as she has in previous Adelaide appearances, AI Laurie Anderson very much will. This comes by way of machinery that has absorbed everything the real Anderson has ever said to create a writing machine made from her specific way with words and how she delivers them. Activated by viewers feeding in short phrases, new works are created in Anderson’s voice and style.
As the Velvet Underground referencing title of the exhibition suggests, I’ll Be Your Mirror does likewise with an AI Lou Reed, using the words of the late lyrical auteur who was Anderson’s partner for twenty-one years.
I’ll Be Your Mirror was developed with Professor Thomas Hajdu, Chair of Creative Technologies and Chief Innovator at the University of Adelaide, and Professor Anton van den Hegel, founding director of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning. Anderson’s tenure as the world’s first AI Artist in Residence at the University of Adelaide’s Sia Furler Institute, presented a golden opportunity.
“Laurie and I have known each other for a really long time, and she has a massive history in innovation in art,’ Professor Hajdu says. “Her approach to working with technology and art is based on curiosity, and moving into the spaces of unknowingness, and I just thought this be a great opportunity for us to do some stuff together.’
The first result of the collaboration was Scroll (2021), an AI-generated version of the Bible, which will also be shown in Adelaide. Scroll’s first appearance at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC predated the current high profile chatter about AI.
“When we started, people didn't know what we're talking about,’ says Anderson. “Of course, now that I'm ‘doing’ AI, I’m always asked to comment, but this has been around forever. It’s just that now we have a name like ‘chat’, but this is nothing to panic about, right?’
Anderson points to a recent screening of Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey she attended at Lisbon Film Festival. One of 2001’s most famous plot points is when the space ship’s computer HAL 9000 rebels. Anderson goes back further to Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1920 play, R.U.R, aka Rossum’s Universal Robots.
“The lines in that play, concerning the worries about robots taking over the world, could have been said yesterday,’ she points out. “I mean, of course any machine can blow up the world. That's what machines do. We built them to do that, and when we give them a little more agency, they will do it. Probably by some mistake, but I don't think it's something that we have to worry about on a daily basis.’
Audiences for I’ll Be Your Mirror so far have embraced the possibilities the technology offers them.
“People's minds are just blown,’ Anderson observes, “because they say to somebody in the audience, give me seven words, and we're going to see what this does. And it does this really kind of beautiful, weird meditation on those words. I don't think it matters to people whether it was written by AI or not. What matters is that it is beautiful, mysterious, funny, or whatever else it can be.’
Coming bang up to date, Anderson is currently working on Ark, an AI generated opera set to premiere in the UK at the 2024 Manchester International Festival. She also currently finds herself a Tik Tok meme by way of two lines from O Superman, which have gone viral.
“The two lines are ‘You don’t know me / But I know you’,’ says Anderson, “and they seem to have hit the zeitgeist, because that’s what Tik Tok is about, identity and wanting to be known, mixed up with a little bit of celebrity. It's kind of a very wonderful communal use of song-writing. I never expected when I wrote that line it would be used this way. I mean, it was really a prayer to technology. It was a lot of things. It was an invocation. It was about power and war. But it was also about identity, and the Tik Tokkers picked up on it.
“Language is very contagious,’ Anderson continues, “and when William Burroughs said that language is a virus, he didn't understand just how quickly this could spread. I really do think words are the most powerful thing in the world, much more than weapons. If you can find the right words to say what it is that you want to say, it will change the world for sure. The words of Gandhi, the words of Jesus, the words of Plato, those are mind-bending idea words that free people.’
Laurie Anderson – I’ll Be Your Mirror, State Library of South Australia, 27th February – 17th March. Free entry. In conversation with Laurie Anderson (Live stream), Bonython Hall, The University of Adelaide, 6 March, 11am. Tickets: $39, Friends $33, Concessions $30.
The List Adelaide summer Festivals Guide, January 2024
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