Laurie Anderson, Notebook

Some artists spend their lives refining a single language. Laurie Anderson has spent more than five decades inventing new ones. Moving between music, performance, drawing, film, technology, storytelling and poetry, she has built a body of work that continually expands the possibilities of what art can be while remaining rooted in a simple but enduring fascination: how ideas take shape, how stories are formed, and how imagination allows us to move beyond the limits of the world as it appears before us.

For CIRCA 20:23, Anderson turns to one of the most intimate spaces within her practice: the notebook. Not the notebook as archive or sketchbook, but as a site of possibility. A place where images arrive before explanation, where thoughts emerge before they become arguments, and where meaning remains fluid rather than fixed. Drawn from more than 135 chalk drawings made across the pages of her personal notebooks, Notebook unfolds over twenty-five days as a sequence of animated works that reveal themselves gradually across CIRCA’s global network of public screens.

Created in response to CIRCA’s 2023 manifesto, Hope: The Art of Reading What Is Not Yet Written, the project approaches hope not as a political slogan or philosophical proposition, but as an act of imagination. Throughout her career, Anderson has resisted the demand that art provide answers. Instead, she has consistently opened spaces in which uncertainty, curiosity and speculation can flourish. The drawings that populate Notebook inhabit precisely this territory. Figures appear and disappear. Landscapes drift into view. Fragments of language hover momentarily before dissolving back into darkness. The works refuse to settle into a single narrative, inviting viewers instead to construct their own relationships between image, memory and meaning.

The result is a public artwork that unfolds less like an exhibition than a conversation. Each evening introduces a new page, a new thought, a new possibility. Together, these fragments form a constellation of ideas that resist conclusion. Rather than directing audiences toward a particular interpretation, Anderson offers something increasingly rare within contemporary culture: the freedom to look without instruction and to imagine without limitation.

This freedom lies at the heart of Anderson’s understanding of hope. When asked what gives her hope, she does not speak of certainty, progress or prediction. Instead, she points to imagination itself. The ability of people to think beyond inherited assumptions, to envision realities that do not yet exist, and to create meanings that cannot be prescribed in advance. In this sense, Notebook becomes an invitation to inhabit a space of openness at a moment when so much of contemporary life feels increasingly defined by explanation, categorisation and control.

Presented nightly across some of the world’s busiest urban environments, Anderson’s drawings appear as brief interruptions within the visual noise of the contemporary city. Hovering above traffic, commerce and daily routine, they offer moments of reflection that are at once deeply personal and unexpectedly collective. The notebook, traditionally a private object, is transformed into a public commons. Thoughts that once existed only on a page become shared encounters experienced simultaneously across London, Berlin, Milan, Seoul and Tokyo.

Launching on the full moon, Notebook also recalls an older relationship between humanity and the unknown. Long before information could be summoned instantly, people looked outward toward distant horizons and night skies as places of wonder, mystery and possibility. Anderson’s animations recover something of that sensibility. They remind us that not everything needs to be explained in order to be meaningful, and that imagination remains one of the most powerful tools through which we navigate an uncertain world.

As the pages of Notebook unfold throughout the month, Anderson offers no destination and no final resolution. Instead, she presents a series of openings. Small acts of poetic freedom that encourage us to look differently, think differently and perhaps imagine differently. In doing so, she suggests that hope is not something we discover fully formed, but something we create together through the ongoing exercise of imagination itself.