(Online) On Process with Laurie Anderson

hi good evening everyone my name is marina isgrow and i'm associate curator of media and performance art at the hershon museum and sculpture garden thank you so much for joining us for

tonight's event on process with lori anderson it's great to see a nice big crowd here tonight um quick note that card captioning and american sign language interpretation

are provided for tonight's program you can find more information about both of those options in the chat so tonight laurie and i will be in conversation for about 45 minutes

and then we'll open it up to audience q a so if you'd like to submit a question you can do that at any time during the program just hit the q a button at the bottom of your zoom screen

so now i am honored to introduce lori anderson a grammy award-winning musician performer writer and artist whose exhibition the weather is currently on

view at the hershon through july one of the leading multimedia artists of our time she is especially known for her groundbreaking performances that combine captivating storytelling

with music and visual effects and for her pioneering work with electronic technologies as a visual artist anderson has shown work at moma the guggenheim museum soho

the walker arts center the soldier george pompidou in paris and other major institutions she has released numerous albums including big science which features the

iconic single of superman and she recently delivered the charles elliott norton lectures at hartford university this is the first of several talks and performances we'll be hosting with lori

this season uh please visit our website to view the full list i think we're at eight at this point so today lori and i will be talking about artistic process

by the time most of us see an artwork it is finished and ready for the world to view but what we don't often see is what the work went through to reach its final

state what was the initial idea what did the first draft look like how and why did it evolve into what it is now so we're going to address these questions while discussing several of

lori's projects starting with the weather an exhibition that underwent many transformations before opening this fall and it's been my true pleasure to work with lori on the show over the past two

years of that process so lori thank you so much for joining us tonight thanks marina yeah um so for a little bit of background on

the weather um our director melissa chu approached you about doing a show at the hirshhorn i think at this point six years ago and since then it really evolved and

changed quite a bit uh first under my predecessor mark beasley and then during the coveted pandemic and the long museum closure so i thought we could start off just looking at uh some of your initial

concepts for the show maybe you could walk us through those and some of the changes along the way um we were thinking of maybe starting with virtual reality which was initially a huge part of the plan

yeah here's one of the first plans uh whoops there we go um and that one uh i think it's one of a

somebody counted 125 of these maps yes our exhibition designer has a folder called 125 lorries oh they hate me oh okay so um

this is when it was going to be there was going to be a lot of virtual reality in the show so you see in here one was called to the moon and we had a lot of plans for how to put people in headsets

and and and into the virtual world i also see something called the word bush a lot of these things i i barely remember i think that was a projection onto a tree so

that all the branches looked like they were streaming dna and then here's one uh that is still has

the vr in it and also has screening rooms and all sorts of other ideas now uh

so we really wanted to sort of plunge into this vr world and have people put their headsets on and just like drop into this place and

because uh we're going to look at just a little clip of one of these pieces that was called a chakram and here it is um

let's see let's start it up here and you put your headset on and then you go into this other world of uh stories really and and images

so through these various doors and a long um oh here's we're going to travel i dreamed i was a dog in a dog's house this made a words a

drawing made of letters and my father came to the talk show and he said that's a really good dog

because i like that virtual reality is a void you you have to put the first thing you have to put is atmosphere

so what my collaborators mentioned long built was atmosphere fragments of things in this case tiny letters this is a place made of words and stories so you can

you fly through this thing a lot of people start falling i mean seeing it on a flat screen like we are now if you go like this you know up to your

screen and maybe you'll get like fly through this place but it's a whole lot of um scary ramps and then you can go through if you fly through here you can fly up above

the whole edifice and see a lot of stuff it would take a very long time to be there sort of just going to jump

out now much time and um [Music] still from it and um [Music]

this from another piece called to the moon which we are going to show and in this one you you uh fly to the moon and and here's uh

a scene in which you you see all of the trash sort of circling around the moon and the earth rising uh this was one of the plans of uh uh at

uh nasa at one point is trying to basically ship all the trash to the moon and all the pesky manufacturing things here's another scene in which now

the atmosphere and the and the uh and the air is defined by dna these dinosaurs on the moon that you can fly in and through it's really a lot of fun

i i mean i was really looking forward to having a big vr presentation because we've gotten to do that in a lot of places around the world and um

it's it's uh it's intoxicating here's what it looks like when you uh are in this this one is at mass moca and that i

think it's still running i think um anyway you put these um massive headsets on and off you go into this world so that it did wasn't too drastic a

change from this world to the virtual world we built in manchester when we showed it a couple years ago a a place where you could sort of

transition so where there would be projected images onto the floor and and sort of spheres and here and there to to

make the transition a little bit um easier between the those worlds uh here is what we were going to build at the hirschmann we were going to build a like little floating platform

uh and so the vr would be um uh above and below and around you uh as as one of the areas where you you were

sort of waiting for the experience and then here's another um uh drawing of of how that was going to work so

pandemic shows up and and this is not possible you know we just couldn't use headsets and so i remember that meeting well okay vr is out what's plan b i was like plan

b plan b um you know because that was like a third of the floor plan was going to be it was a it was a big part of the show so they go what else do you want to have i was yeah

i mean obviously everyone had to do that in the pandemic and is still doing it um so what we did was we used a little piece of the hallway eventually when the show opened with one scene from this

work projected on and so it looked like this as you come through this is now now where you're in the hirschhorn looking at projection and it's you just start get kind of sucked into this doorway

and then you walk into a room that looks like this and now this is sort of um my version of what vr would look like in paint you know so

this um this is full of of stories and and uh uh jokes and quotes and things that i really that are on my mind and

uh this is a one of the stories that um was part of the the to the moon vr it's about a lawsuit that the chinese brought in the international courts

saying that they own the moon and you know the reaction was okay you can see there's uh the reactions to the suit was the americans go no no way we had the

first guys there you know and the uh uh the russians go no we had that we had the first um we you know we had the first um satellite and then

not saturday but anyway we saw the dark side the first time and and then of course the italians go we saw it first so along with the moon was the thing in there

um marina you were there when i was working on this thing i was there yes this was a two to three week period where lori was

painting this entire room by hand covering the total floor all four walls she was riding this lift up and down that you can see on the right bent over the floor i honestly don't know how you

did it lori for eight hours a day every day it was a crazy amount of fun yeah but yeah maybe you could tell us a little bit more about this gallery in general because it also underwent a lot

of changes and it has um kind of four sculptures in it that changed their planning process yeah it was a way that how does language relate to imagery is really what this room was

about in many ways it was called originally four talks and if and they were going to be centering around four things in this room one of them was going to be a canoe

uh and then as you can see here it's it's a it's a it's a clues basically it's a it's a very bad repair i i really like the idea of something very broken and poorly

repaired and then gilded so um this is the original drawing for that thing was going to be on a very stinky smelly uh pile of that got mixed mixed right away but we shouldn't

sorry i'm i'm a smell in in exhibitions i really do you know it's like there's a lot of sound in this one but smell no and here's another one which

was a shelf uh a shelf which is about collecting and and and substitution so there were each each of these objects and you know repair and

subject substitution this is a story about hope you see it's achatka sitting on a high shelf um and there was a woman who had this collection of glasses and she lived next to a train

track and every time the train went by the house shook and the shelf you know so we actually have the sound of a train shaking the shelf so the shelf in the museum is going you know once every i don't know a few

minutes and anyway the store in the story the women uh her collection keeps breaking so she keeps you know replacing with cheaper and

cheaper stuff until she's just left with a bunch of cheap junk you know so um then other stories are told by a couple of birds in there this on the one

on the left is a a parrot that we we he was originally made for a show in brazil and i thought he'd never work again but we dug him up and it was like you know it was like he

spent the last couple hundred years in a pirate chest at the bottom of the ocean he was still like oh you know and he his head turns his beak moves it's a very fanciful addition for a parrot because

they don't have lips you know he tells he's he's talking for about an hour i guess and in in the middle of making a record now of his uh speech

and then this one on the right is a raven and uh the the story of this um raven is is kind of

key to what what some of the stories in the show are about which are um noah's ark and uh the flood so because you remember the raven was that there were two birds

there are always two birds and all the mythologies one black and one right in this case noah's floating out there the flood is still everyone's still trapped in the india ark and he sends a raven out raven

never comes back and i just love that story i mean a bird that sent out and and finds nothing and never comes back i find that i don't know

oddly inspiring and then then of course the next bird sent out is the dove and and dove gets all the credit it's the you know uh olive branch becomes the unp signal

that symbol that kind of thing yeah so um really quick laura we have a question from someone actually about this room um monica miller is asking will you speak

about the chalkboard look of a lot of this work what led you to that style or aesthetic choice oh i um usually when i that's a great question i usually when i

start a project i i have a chalkboard and i do a diagram of the of the project and the diagram often looks like drawings and words and when i look back

today at some of my early notes for this show it this one has nothing to do with that so it's really interesting so the chalk is about erasing and being able to kind of

go no that didn't work so well how about this and then no and then you can smudge it and you can um change it so it's it's about uh process

then it really is uh about um and i guess i mean i guess i kind of liked school i know i did like i like the blackboard and

and the whole erasing thing so that that is um is is it's uh is its nature is very very uh kind of temporary and um although um

it was really an improv thing to do this because i had no plan i just started with one phrase and then kind of reassociated the rest of the

world yeah and it wasn't chalk it was paint so once you put it down it was that would be great if people could erase it with their socks i did have a

room once in my studio that was actually slate and it was black slate um all four surfaces and you could erase that in your socks and just you know go in there it was really fun it was very dusty

though so anyway um that parrot over there on the left had um an earlier uh ancestor this this guy was a parrot that i made

i don't know maybe mid 90s and it was in the guggenheim soho show and this parrot was interactive so you can see the same kind of same chalkboard thing is in there

it's been something i do a lot of this parent was uh had a sensor in his chest so you could tell if somebody would enter the room and you try to engage them get them to come over you're

just like however you might try to do that with this sometimes you would just go you just hear this voice going yeah darling you are looking so wonderful today just you know sort of chit chat we

really should have lunch you know and people began using it as a kind of shrink um and and kind of putting a lot of they there are a lot of repeat visitors

to this parrot because it was had a kind of eerie feeling that was listening to you um let's see next version of this

oh i'm not sure when this was but this involved uh so the four talks room was looking a certain way there was going to be a screening room there was going to be a solid ram

that was going to be a record that i made of a quartet for solute and hovering over that was going to be a work by

tristan um duke i think is his name and he's a wonderful artist who makes holograms so over this record you would see one of

saul wit's um open cubes sort of circling around i used um i was his student in art school

and i was looking at one of his drawings number drawings and i was i was like wow that looks like music and he said why don't you write some from that so i used that to write this piece and it really does

i have to say sound a lot like his drawings it really and we should mention that you're going to be presenting that in july oh yeah yeah yeah super exciting yeah we'll be

uh a quartet we're also uh pumping it up for a chain chamber orchestra version of that now so that will be in uh in the fall in in belgium

along with a a new uh a revised work actually that i did 20 years ago an orchestra piece about amelia earhart featuring her log so mumbling lori over there on the thing

was uh it was going to be i i wanted to have somebody be at the beginning of the show telling you about yourself and because i do a lot of film sculptures and

there turned out to be a lot of film sculpture in this in this show something that i began to make in 1975 with a little piece called that the shrinks but here's here is this one we

have her around because she's still in my studio this is like a foam uh version that was going to be projected onto this was the person who is going to be

uh kind of mumble telling you uh [Music] what the show meant so that you didn't have to like worry about what it meant and she you know you just come in and this person would

be um yeah and there was a sand castle in there too at one point oh yeah there was let's go to that there was a sand castle

that was it was just know it was actually a pile of sand but you would see uh that it was um had been a castle

and you'll you see it in uh reverse so we had to we built uh we made them okay so this is a uh it's about various ways to change your

mind in your view of the world that says well i don't know why i wrote that on this thing but um uh so there was also going to be a blood-stained rug in this and objects that had sort of

histories here's a film of uh when we were trying to make this sandcastle blow away um

was so in other words what you see is um a pile of sand and then you see a very sort of light projection on the wall behind it

the sand shapes itself into a castle and then it disappears so it moves around so it's just about um uh obviously sort of the

very nature of things we have then the next version is it looks more like i think you think that looks more like what we actually did that's very close to the final show yes yeah

um did we have 125 meetings i hope not we had a lot uh possibly i mean some of them were before my time so yeah

um eventually some of the things in here uh says uh let's see do we have the flags here yeah there are the flags lines are in there

yeah this because it was a show that was really very designed in the pandemic uh and also kind of very much about the last four years uh there was a

lot of things um that while it was called the weather it it referenced um other things so that we have this this kind of uh

it became a kind of choreographed work for red flags and two sides of a question was very important originally it was going to be paintings that had one painting on one

side and a completely different thing on the other and wind that would blow this way and that way so that you would just see the i mean i've just been very

conscious of of the way that country is so divided that i there was there were just ways that i wanted to show the two sides of things and how they could just flip

so quickly since you could see this painting and then and it is opposite and they would slowly kind of become one so that was the idea of that but

telling stories in a in a museum is is really challenging that was probably the thing that was the most challenging to me and it's it's like being the narrator

and um and uh in this case this is a shot from a performance in which i'm using a camera to uh talk on uh delay

i think just because um i'm usually a solo performer i usually try to make some kind of situation where there's another voice in it or just out

of loneliness really you know and um what i wanted to do with the show really was um to look at stories and

see how they're made and what they are so one of my starting points was um my experience as a as a teacher when

i was in uh a young artist it was the only uh job i had and i was teaching um um [Music] egyptian

architecture and a syrian sculpture in a college in new york and i was not keeping up with the journals i wasn't really an academic so i i this a slide like this could come up and

i would like i wouldn't i would just draw a blank i couldn't remember anything about it so i would just make things up you know and then the students would write it down and i would test them on it

and and i thought you know um so much of what's happened in the world is surrounded by opinion it's it's like comes through heavy filters that you know you're not really sure what's going

on the same with dreams and there's a lot of dreams in the show this isn't um a uh i you know really hate hearing people's dreams i don't tell people my own dreams

but i do write them down and this is this is a from a book that i made in which you put all those you know uncle elf was telling me no it's not uncle alpha's uncle ralph you

know you're like uh um put into a code so uh in a funny way it's easier to read

code in uh dreams and code because you start to see patterns that you might not see we used that in the show this is a um

is this book doing by the way i mean is that is that it's holding up yes so this was a very late addition to the show right yesterday yeah um and there's been

wear and tear i mean with all of these mechanical things the flags the book and so on there's always going to be you know some wear on the on the materials and on the motors um this one's holding up it's still the

pages are still flipping back and forth i think they've gotten a little bit uh smudged like the ink is smudging a little bit yeah that's good it's in a box that has a fan on your side so it

blows this way then blows that way so again it's the the uh the the wind is is moving to this uh show in in many ways um and

here's another um text thing that was came from a project that he was doing in australia about working with the supercomputer uh language supercomputer

that crossed all of my writing and um songs and i think quotes uh with the bible and came up with a 9 000

page text so this is this is some some things that from from uh genesis and revelation um

about uh in that language and so uh the bible yeah according to me so this was also a very late addition to the show

right yeah yeah we were looking for a book publisher really late in the game right with that thin bible uh

yeah i mean that was the original thing of when they working with the super computer they said what do you want you're the artist in residence here what do you want to do with this language super computer

and my first response was like it's a super computer why doesn't it figure out a project to do so then i said let's teach this super computer to read and how about the bible

so the very first thing we did was take the three streams of languages that went into making the bible hebrew or american greek and you could if you increased one you could see what

it would sound like if it was more greek or or more aramaic and the question was if you make if you use more of the greek in the translation would it be would the bible be more rational if you used more

of that hebrew would be more mystical we did not really get an answer to that question so i think yeah i think we have a few more images of things that did not

ultimately make it into the show so lori maybe you could talk through just a few of those um yeah let's quickly go through that i know i think people are also interested based

on the q a and why certain things didn't make it into the show so how do you oh yeah i can tell you like well this one didn't because it would i i've made a

lot of images and and films and videos and i thought um and and that's that the hard part about taking this from the world that i come from which is performance and and

media how do you put that world that comes from it from darkness into a very white walled situation a very presentational situation it's very different and also how do you put narrative in something

like that because you know how it feels when you're looking at a show and you're like there's the sculpture there's the painting you can see them like boom and then you go to the video room and you're going oh that's going to take me four

hours to get through this so here's the video room and i wanted to put it on and and we didn't do it because it it stops the traffic too much it's not really you know we are going to show them uh

later when is sometime later right yeah i think we can we can put the exact date in the chat because it's not coming to me yeah so they are showing two columns yes

yeah so the reason for these uh um is uh it it um interrupts the flow it's just not the right thing this one

was a series of models that were i had they were tabletop projection things and they were for example we were going to have cameras in four or five places

in the world that i considered my like utopias and i guess it was the pandemic that was making me making me feel this is miserable what's a really beautiful place so we're going to have

um cameras um and little projectors onto these models so that you'd see these perfect places day and night for many months and you could just kind of dream about them i guess it was just about

being trapped in the pandemic this is a and needing to go out somehow this is a monument that i did when i was asked to make a monument in new york and made it

for murder victims and um and and again made a model and projected on it so these these are kind of like moving sculptures in a way this monument i proposed was um i think

this was for the new york times was a temporary monument because i knew how many people would complain about murder monument in their neighborhood so i made it so that you could move the monument you could take it up and you

just the water supply could be some other fountain uh but the the murder monument code well elsewhere this is a uh i wish this had been in there it was just

a very very bright yellow room made of felt and it was just going to be uh you know uh

there was going to be some kind of sharp like like uh sound that would just so there was a listening mat in it um again um

uh it was a little bit about uh kovid and this was a singing barbed wire piece that i i was trying to make in along the border uh so you know just the way songs are

connected to roads in the us you know like route 66 this was going to be um a road that was was singing um songs through through the barbed wire which was going

to be um uh activated so you know how it can kind of hum and so this was going to be then coming into the museum along the curved wall of the of the

hirschhorn you would be able to see various points along the border where this singing was going on um this was something that it's a little too complicated to explain but it was a

green screen thing or you you'd step up to a podium as you're the guy you're the visitor and you would be uh you would be

answering questions but the um uh the and your face would be projected on the wall as you do that but you um

the the projected words that are completely different from the words that you're saying so it's it's the it was a it was a kind of it was dedicated to sarah huckabee sanders um and how

stories get spread and how they get told and here's one uh again with these little film sculptures uh

and it was um all these people who were sharpening knives it worked eventually was called the citizens which was in the show um

here's um some there were also going to be a series of drawings that went through the show and this was uh a uh

there was one point when the show was called everything is listening and it was it was really all about sound um so really it's the show has turned inside out since it was um begun

i'm sure a lot of people experienced that in the in the pandemic you start working on one thing and it's by the end of this time of strange solitude and um and your mind is like working in a

different way it becomes very different this is a a story that i've always loved which is um a kind of apocryphal story about a uh

a vase that a japanese ancient japanese pot was incised with grooves and supposedly some engineers at bell labs thought well what is that it's like a

three-dimensional record so what if you got a three-dimensional record player to play the pot you could maybe because when the pot's thrown it's like it's working like cutting the grooves over records and

maybe you could if you could re replay that you could hear the sounds of the potter potty in the pot two thousand years ago um that pot was going to be in the show uh

it's like now um we're going to go back to what the show looked like in answer to the question of um

the person who said why did certain things come in white yeah yeah in this case um it uh it was really hard to actually make this pot

and that was going to be a sort of centerpiece of of um how uh sound gets embedded into things and it's an idea that that completely fascinates

me in terms of of uh how sound behaves in the world and how it hits things and can change them do you are there works that you showed us

just now that you still want to make at a later date or are these sort of ideas that sort of burned out and you think are probably just going to remain at the sketch level no a few of them i really would and i

really would i would love to make this pot i would i would really love to to see if if that could work and um uh well i mean really um

[Music] once you start with a sketch like this then you know that it's not going to look like that at the end so yeah i would use these as jumping off apartment places um let's see here are some things that we

did make a a film that's projected as kind of sidewalk film i i again it's like looking at so many screens like this where everything is

like just happening in front of your head like this i really love things where you you have to move your body like in vr you have to move around use your your body

and when you when you go to a movie like uh if it's a really good movie you know how you feel at the end you're like you got movies over you go oh god who am i

where's my coat what's my name you ain't paralyzed looking at the film you're not using your body i mean nothing wrong with with that kind of paralysis because your mind

is going like that but i like to make visual situations where you you know you're looking down or you're moving through uh vr or you you really need your body

and i and i kind of think that that's a really interesting future for film that um to use um technology to tell stories i think is

going to be um more and more uh the thing do you see it that way yeah absolutely i mean but you're laura you're the pioneer of

that i think you know it's become almost commonplace now among contemporary artists to you know to work with technology and film and video in the museum but that

you know was not a thing even even a lot of those stories aren't really well known for some reason for example i mean not in the 70s i was part of

a scene mostly in europe of a lot of uh electronic music and was being made by women and that's a story nobody knows there's in fact there's just a recent film or

film last year that came out called sisters with transistors um that tells that story and you know there's so many and speaking of stories that um get told

um that's one of them that that never did really until this woman kind of goes along let me make a film about that so uh it's uh let's see what what else can

we look at um uh a lot of here's this painting room and this is my um kind of i mean i

uh as a young artist did a lot of paintings i'm not gonna say started as a painter because you know i always did a lot of different things but i was doing a lot of paintings and this is a

a kind of um you know how uh you're not supposed to do more than one or two things in the art world you know it's like if you can if you're a painter you

shouldn't really do a sculpture but i mean i when i do these paintings they're they're they're big um i am it feels exactly like doing music to me

you know like playing this this note or making this color and i ask myself the same questions um

is it is it colorful enough is it mysterious enough is it weird enough is it straight enough is it you know all those things is it telling what kind of story is it is it

just is it abstract enough all of those things are the same questions uh for music as for as for images for me so

i don't have this dividing line um i have to say though that um you know i uh

feel ex very sheepish about uh these paintings and especially with friends of mine who are are really good painters you know because i think i'm secretly afraid that they'll say you know

you know i i was thinking of like making a record you know like a hit record and i was like okay

knock yourself out good luck so you know i i think it's just great that there aren't any rules about what you're i mean there are rules but

if that it's possible to break those rules is is important i think in this oh yeah here we are uh trying to um we're looking at a maquette of how these things go

and uh speaking of process i did as when when these were hung i i got to

touch them up a little bit you know because i i needed to to uh clean up the edges so that the canvas that wrapped around it wouldn't be just like super messy so i was gonna do that

and then i got super carried away and and i just redid one you know a couple of them completely while they were in the museum that's always been my dream of a museum

where you could go in at night and you could just like keep working on them yeah we're very grateful to our conservators [Music] for their patients with a lot they were

very very nice to me they were really old and i was quite messy uh i i was getting very excited towards the end like i made we're already at 6 40. so i'm wondering

if you want to move on to maybe some projects other than the weather and we can come back to this in q a sure sure um we're going to breeze through these

really quickly now because i it's i'm really about a quarter of the way through things here you know a little miscalculation um

in the show there's some retrospective things in this case a table that you listen to which i made in 1978 so this was a um

a real retrospective part and and in terms of process i made this table because i was writing something working on an electric typewriter and it was i read the read the thing and it was so

stupid i was like ah and i put my head in my hands i heard the motor coming up through my arms and into

my head like putting on headphones i thought bingo i'm going to like make a singing table so this is what it is it's works do bone conduction this way you have some drivers that compress the

sound drive it through your elbows and up into your head we made it in brazil a more communal version because you know that brazil is so there are lots of people around the table so they're all

listening to that and because it's a little science fair i would just draw um a picture of how to use it on the wall rather than then described by a bone conduction you put your hands on it just

did something to say you know how here we are this is we're back at the hirschhorn and uh this is this um [Music] show is dedicated to uh lou reed and

also to john cage and here's a picture of john and me listening to traffic in his loft in 1991 and

it's uh i don't know that artist is is um endlessly inspiring to me you know john cage also really

um because of his you know he was so happy that made a huge impression on me you

know like a lot of old people are like like ah i had it you know it didn't work out and he got more than i got i'm just yeah i'm

sick and we've had it but he was like what should we ah you know he's always smiling and um and always interested and i thought this

is this is and and this is his quote everywhere is the best seat so it's it's happening in here you know absolutely i mean i think he had a kind of curiosity about the world that

reminds me of you a lot well he was very open-minded to sound and as everything is music and and that is something that teaches

teaches you so much and and and you realize that you've you've um you're always um it's always available to you so he's quoted many many times in the

show right um i don't know if there's time to quickly show a couple of things from aichi should we do that or let's do that let's do that so yeah yeah

this is jumping back in time to a project you did in aichi japan for expo 2005 and it's a series of installations called the electronic garden yeah

yeah yeah so so i was asked to to take um a classical japanese garden which they they kind of tore up and they said we wanted you to make an electronic garden

so they they um pulled this one up i don't know it's a lovely place and so i began

learning a lot about uh japanese gardens and what to do and i made a number of um it was it was a huge project and and i'm

showing it to you because um many of the projects again and proposals didn't work out for technical reasons but um uh

sometimes i i saw i got around it in some way uh it's um some of the things that were happening were little um floating uh islands of

imagery so that you would see uh the weather um uh reef uh the sky reflected in the water on these these little plates there's there's something like that in the in the

uh four talks room now too it's a it's just a actually i spilled some paint on the floor and i said oh that could be a puddle and so then that it became this poem of like

uh puddles are selfies made by clouds you know so this was the same sort of idea of imagery that comes um in a vertical way here's a here's a um

this one i i tried to do at the hirschhorn actually and we weren't able to do it because it was outside it is a it is a uh screen

and it endlessly makes chalk drawings uh and it's in its of the of what's in front of it and uh kind of updating it through the weather and i just through through the through the day so that sometimes it's really foggy and it

just tries to keep up with that um this is these are little palms that were stuck all over the place and this is a huge um uh

like central park sized um area of with all of these um lakes and and uh so so my job was to put small things in it like

here there are these just tiny tiny tiny little screens and they're on the edge of the forest which i find a really interesting place where the garden meets the forest and it's just this kind of

um no man's land so this was a very way to blur uh that line uh silly things like an aquascope which um i think would be a handy thing you

can just look down and see what's uh beneath the surface just because um i think there was a tree fishing one too

i don't have that maybe um the this was in this was imagery on the bottom of a bridge that was about looking at things with water

coming going and underneath you um this was a six this did not work this excited film i couldn't get this excited film to work but i thought how beautiful to have like uh something

hanging in the tree that was like a cube of air that had just things moving through it uh but the restrained view of uh of

japanese gardens it's it's all about like looking this way or looking that way and framing things so this was literally uh a framing device that was working with those ideas of how to see

things but in their case with lots of frames these um were rocks that were sort of very subtly put into the other piles but would just

start to glow in kind of weird ways um and i got to work with you know like uh museum of natural uh the these um these places that would make fake rocks

and and uh they would just sort of do very subtle things this is um oh tobisi the stepping stones that were um um poems that you would

uh a lot of these things were about streams and this was a stepping stone uh that had a uh and then there were also these little um

automated uh uh things that would move down streams because um if you wanted to write a love letter to

someone you would you would drop it in the stream and and go down and they would meet let's see what oh this is some binoculars in which you could look at and they made everything look really

hellish um they would add really bad filters to a really beautiful scene so you'd be looking through that and it was suddenly everything was just

it was it was the scene but everything was melting uh that's that's one that that's a very handy thing to have that sort of negative binoculars lots of things that were going

below the surface this was a water wheel that you could turn over on the edge and and have things come and go now in the end the park so there are all these ideas and again

they went on for a couple of years we're making all of these things and tests and then finally it comes to what are they really going to look like in the park and it was really fun to make because it

was all these little icons that would um uh take you through uh the experience and and making and things

glowing things under bridges this one is it was a a nice one which is it's a just a visual scramble in the trees and you it was made for children so only from

one point does it look like a tiger wow the time it just looks like gibberish um so a lot of it was about seeing and experiencing water and

um walking in different ways there were many things with headphones there were many things uh with site-specific music that was done this is an azumaya which is a little like um

um a little uh um structure in gardens uh that's a classical structure in gardens and i'm i made a

one that was a electronic word fountain so it's you can sit around this thing this was not as as successful as i hoped because in this case

you feel a kind of awful combination of nature and electronics that was not nice it was it was sort of harsh and so

um it it i thought you know it's it's much better just to have a real fountain uh this one though did work well this is a bridge

that was worked um it was called the turtle bridge and you could slide your hand along this railing as you crossed it and make music so it was it was very very subtle and it

was just really beautiful you could make these gongs and then backward gongs and and um and it wasn't uh uh it was it was beautiful rather than

oppressive so that was them yeah i wish i had seen that so i think we should probably jump into questions now we've got about 10 minutes left but

i there is a question that relates to some slides that i know you have so michael lentz is asking about your work with nasa um and whether you're still doing it and if not

why not would you want to keep doing it oh i would love to work with this i would i would just love to be doing that be i mean that just came like

out absolutely out of the blue of like would you like to um be the artist residence at nasa i was like what you know when somebody asks says your dream out loud you're like you don't believe them so when they called

me and said that i was like you're not from nasa i just love a button you know so he was and and i did uh some projects there

with um all sorts of things that that this was in 2004 till about six and i tried to stretch it out to seven met a lot of really

uh in incredible people uh engineers and uh people just making these mind-boggling things

my um relationship was mostly more more towards the um nanotechnologists who had more time to talk to the so-called artist in residence and they they were asking

uh questions that that i found really very interesting um i worked a lot with color there so there was you know when you see images like this

um that kind of look like right out of walt disney um you asked you know my question was to these guys which at hubble um in

maryland because i worked at all sorts of different agencies you know how did you decide on this color palette when there is no uh in space so there's you know

different spectrums different ways to think about it but um the uh um

the answer i said how come you you you you hit on this kind of teepolo you know palette of baby pink and baby blue and you know

gold and they said well you know we thought people would like it he said he thought people would like it i mean first of all i'm the artist in residence here you know i was like aren't you

supposed to be like giving a picture of how things are anyway i was also there for the mars this is an image of a sound image of the the first sound in the first image of the planet was in sound

and this is uh from the 60s of that's an image of mars later realized it looked more like this sent up those little robot rovers

this is when i was there they were painting scenes of mars on the parking lot you can see in the upper right corner that it's california and uh and this is just a flat that they're painting to look like mars where they

were driving around what kind of blew my mind was when these two the garden project and that and the nasa project came together uh when i realized you know that um the

red um soil of aichi in japan looked like mars it was just this deep red stuff and so well we the the project was to be use some of

the robot rovers very first images from ours and beam them down into uh the um uh onto this because the the story of

course of of of what we were doing on mars we were looking for for life uh and and that is really what's going on in the in in the classic

texts of um uh japanese gardens too uh in terms of text like dogan who wrote uh a beautiful uh

text 13th century zen master are mountains of where what in nature has consciousness and what does not i mean are leaves alive are they you know

what's alive and what isn't so this look this search for life seemed to come together in this in this one project between those those two things yeah that's a great example of

how to apparently unrelated projects just because they coincided temporarily sort of influenced each other well i think that it's such a basic question you know that that everybody's

asking it from different points of view we're asking it now in terms of ai what's alive and what isn't we're asking that in terms of of kovit is not alive it you know you think it's a germ it's

not a german virus and has everything to do with language in in terms of of how it's um uh really can they can also they can go

viral they can replicate they can be deceptive they can mimic they are language and virus are very similar so but they're they're on they're both

described as on the edge of life yeah sometimes language seems alive but it's really a code and so is the virus that's why we can't we can create the virus yeah it keeps

replicating and changing so i think those basic questions are um no matter what you know we're somehow trying we're looking at them through all sorts of different yeah all sorts of different ways

great okay so more questions now that are back to the weather um i'm going to group a couple of them together so william davis is asking have

any reactions to the weather surprised you and dorothy and drake is asking have you spent time observing people experiencing the show that's a really good question because i

have uh done that in fact i'm doing a working on an ai guide to the weather which is um a another program that i'm working with

machine learning institute is um they also then put all the my language and syntax vocabulary stories whatever let's say approach to

stories into this um algorithm and and what that does is look at images and then it comes up with language it tries to describe that image

which is our criticism which is you know all of us who are trying to go what is what am i seeing over there what is that how can i put that into words putting things into words and putting words into things is the exchange that's going on

here so uh i have a lot of photographs and a couple weeks ago i went and took a lot of photographs of people looking at these these these things

and then running it through the program and this it's beautiful language what it was trying to say there there is something on the wall but

it's it could be more like shadows and there's something in so it tries to go foreground it tries to understand what's there tries to understand the world and it's it's um

it it takes you back into the basic mystery of what it is to see and and how it and how you how you can see without

uh without all the filters that you that we use and you know like oh art has to be in a frame so we can see it clearly and make it separate from what from our

visual world and so all of those things uh become really interesting issues when you look at people looking great so alan neil is asking you've been

my go-to for decades for inspiration um this isn't as a copycat method but rather as clearing of the creative cobwebs to allow myself to reach farther and deeper i've relied on you for this

and you've never disappointed my question is what does this for you what clears your creative cobwebs if you ever get any oh yeah they're um

i think trying to uh just what i was just trying to to describe is is um have no

preset ideas about what i'm looking at you know to really take the and cobwebs is a really good way to to say it because you know you do feel like ah like when you've been asleep you're

taking the sand or the cobwebs out of your eyes and sometimes you you can really see very clearly when you're not expecting something you know it's just like uh so i guess don't expect

something and then something will be uh interesting in a new way i think so i guess i mean but creative cobwebs i

mean i i also think you know oh gosh i've got this is such a new cool idea and then i look back into something that i did before and it's this is the exact same thing you know

you know we all have our themes and i thought this is brand new oh no no it's like just another version of that and that's you know that's okay i mean it's it's um

it's it's okay to have themes absolutely okay i'm gonna combine two more so sarah thomas says i love how this exhibit has an all-encompassing energy to it like a never-ending story

how have you come to a place as an artist where you're able to make such strong installations and then real quick louise greene asks did someone encourage your very prolific and

multimedia expression when you were growing up or is this something you explored on your own well first of all i think that i i was um

allowed to do an exhibition that was pretty sprawling you know i wasn't you know and i think that in in many cases uh the the the rules are quite different

uh it's it's a rule but i mean marina i'm sure you can like speak to that too because sometimes you know um the the the uh the

space dictates how things look you know i don't know and the person is is really quite unusual yes

yeah so so the rules get loosened like don't do anything when you say yeah absolutely i mean for people who don't know it's shaped like a donut it's round and hollow in the middle

and the best work responds to the curve rather than trying to build around it and make things really square and i think a lot of lori's works in the weather really respond to the shape and

even the whole show itself i think works really nicely as a circle it sort of ends where it begins you know yeah speaking of circles it is very circular that way and and i think in

terms of um as being inspired as a kid i think probably my biggest inspiration was the art teacher when really uh maybe

first grade or something and she i remember her so well i mean uh she had a big hat our lives were completely ruled

by bells at that point your bell would ring and you'd go you sit down in your class another bell would ring and you'd get your books ready and then another bell and you go down the hall and go to your next it was it was very regimented and

and the art class was the teacher would come in and she would be first of all she'd be late usually and we'd all be like what what

the cheat coming up hello people let's make some i don't know tomatoes and get get out your sloppiest opinions so and then what really blew my mind is

she left before the bill rang i thought can you do that this is like i'm gonna be like her i i'm gonna leave before the bell rings because i don't want to be

in the bell in the bell trap i could i could see that really clearly that she was not in that trap and so you know how you just remember

when you're a kid somebody who was like free i want to be free it made a huge impression on me yeah that reminds me of one of the questions

that someone asked i'm looking for it now oh yes jenny cashmore asks what does freedom mean to you ever since i've had email decades ago my signature was a quote from one of your

early pieces you were born and so you were free so happy birthday yeah um i think uh it's it's um

it changes all the time you know this idea of freedom and this is at the beginning of working on this show i i i was uh and still am

troubled with it with the rules that are are kind of um uh um uh becoming more and more apparent that

we have to toe the line in so many ways that our culture feels more restrictive now to me than it did when i began as an artist now that was also

not so far from the 60s it wasn't so far away from the 60s to early 70s so in the 60s it was really a thing of like i'm just gonna like dance down the road

and figure out what to do and the people who had a plan the people were you know we felt sorry for them you know i'm gonna get a job oh well

that's really whoa it was the 60s so i think we we would have never admitted that at the time because we were avant-garde 70s artists and and we were not you know

doing macrame in the back of the van you know we were like progressives yeah but we had that that we had that in it in us and also

the other point was making art at that time which was a part with a part of a world of um gordon mata clark phillip glass chris brown richard

sarah people starting out like people who we never thought we would make a living from doing this stuff never that's pretty different from it from now

and young artists are you know they start out and their their parents are happy when they say i'm going to be an artist they're going when is your multi-um

city studio gonna start you know okay we are over time but i'm gonna ask you one last question though um so gary hallbrook hallbrook asks is it

possible that the weather exhibition itself is a step in a longer process if so what's next well well it's true that i i do feel the whole

thing as as processed and i and i i guess the other part of that situation is that i never felt like i finished anything ever

yeah i never felt like a that's it perfect i would always just i would abandon it you know i'm just gonna i don't have any more id i don't know how to fix it so

that's when i was over that when i was finished so uh i have a lot of projects that i'm working on now some you know as i mentioned orchestra pieces and and opera

and some books and and uh a soap opera and all these kind of crazy slightly unrelated things no very unrelated things and um

uh so i think um uh they're they all have in a funny way the same relation to the these uh that the the natural the garden and the and

mars mars did you know they're they're all about ways of of trying to figure out what life is you know and and what

uh and what a story is and what um right now the thing that's most exciting to me is i'm in a small group studying something called the nature of mind and

it's a and a buddhist group that kind of tries to actually go back in and see

see your mind and how it's working and it's one of the most exciting things i've ever done because i i've studied this since the late 70s but i

never really felt that i was making so much progress and sometimes when you go oh that that's it back there i can i can see it so that's um uh

that's really thrilling because it's i mean for me uh being an artist and being a buddhist are exactly the same thing as it's just about paying attention

and not believing anything you don't have to believe anything either way you didn't nothing yeah it's up to you to figure out what it is and so right

that i've i find exhilarating that it's not what anybody tells you it's what you find for yourself with your own eyes

with your own ears and that that's that's dangerous that's really that's free that's a great place to end thank you lori yeah it's been fun yeah it's always

great to be with you marina it was wonderful to make the show with you because you've always had such great ideas you know so i really really

appreciate that so much so so much fun this is by far the most fun show i've worked on it was really happening so i i also want to thank shamika and joy for their assistance with

interpretation and captioning tonight and amy for managing the program um a big thank you to everybody who tuned in um so quick note that our next zoom

event in the series with lori will take place uh on march 8th international women's day and it is called oh super women an artist talk with rada akbar and lori anderson

so please tune in for that and then a very quick note that this coming monday a series of lori's video shorts called the personal service announcements we'll go live on our website and we'll be screening through

the end of the show so please check those out and have a good night everybody thank you thanks bye laurie bye you