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Laurie Anderson (born June 5, 1947, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, USA) is an American avant-garde performance artist and composer and filmmaker.
Although she played the violin from childhood, she received her formal training in the visual arts. Her work has incorporated graphics, lighting, sculpture, mime, slides, film, speech, music and many electronics, some of her own design. By 1976, her performances were featured prominently in museums and concert venues across Europe and North America. In 1981, Anderson’s single “O Superman” reached number two on the British pop charts. Until then music had been only one of the media employed in her work. Anderson has achieved greater visibility than most composers of her generation, her unexpected crossover into the popular domain brought her a degree of fame usually unavailable to avant-garde artists.

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Laurie Anderson: A Fantasy Notebook for Freedom

“As a child, I was a kind of a sky worshipper. This was the Midwest and the sky was so vast. It was most of the world. I knew I had come from there. And that someday, I would go back.” (Heart of a Dog, 2015) Is Laurie Anderson an alien? Or a “strange form of life”, as Pitchfork suggested in 1982 when reviewing her debut album “Big Science”? Laurie Anderson’s relentless contributions over the past four decades have often been reminders that our imagination makes us all aliens. Through fantasy, we can expand the sense of what is possible. “Speak my language” (Speak My Language, 1994). A call from the underwater inviting the brainy Ulysses to put aside his goal and intuitively plunge into the unknown. “I’m lost in your words. I’m swimming.” (Freefall, 1994).

Laurie Anderson can hardly be labelled; she is a total artist, a spatial innovator.