Laurie Anderson’s name is associated with the broadest possible meaning of the idea of performance art. Since the 1970s, the American artist has grappled with sound, image, and word, exploring their boundaries by writing, acting, singing and composing, introducing technology into art through electronics, as with the tape-bow violin that substituted the horsehair of the bow with a song on magnetic tape to be played on a microphone. 1981 O Superman made her famous as a chart-topping artist – and abused in Italy, where the Ministry of Health used the composition in an AIDS prevention campaign infamous for stigma messages against HIV-positive people, as well as for the illicit assignment of the project – but over the 5 decades of her career, also as NASA’s first resident artist in the early 2000s, Anderson has been primarily a forerunner of themes that run through contemporary art – “Ethics is the aesthetic of the future”, she quotes in the opening of a work that appeared on Domus in 1977 – and of today’s reflections on technology (computers capable of learning) and its role in society. “I use technology because it is part of many people's daily life and my work is to describe that life”, she told Alessandro Mendini, in this January 1984 conversation, which opened issue 646 of Domus.

How does the impersonal technology of films, slides, and electronic instruments relate to your songs and your autobiographical stories?
First, I am not sure that technology is impersonal. In fact, I am interested in the way technology has been and can be humanized. Many Americans have their most intimate conversations on the phone. Perhaps because it is easier to say personal things when you are not looking at the other person – when the other becomes a disembodied voice. I think of electronics as an extension of the brain; technology has a quickness and immediacy that parallels human thinking. I use technology because it is part of many people’s daily life and my work is to describe that life.

In your performances musical instruments become speaking objects, almost a “double” of yours with whom to talk and mock mankind. Could it be that you’re interested in a life of the object as a romanticism of technology?
My goal is not mockery. It is an attempt to describe and to understand. Maybe it is romantic to animate technology; but I think that there is sometimes a thin line between animate and inanimate objects. Think of many people’s attitudes towards their cars: beasts that perform. Or, in English, many of the words used to describe electricity suggest life: live wire, for example. Something that has so much power that it seems to live. 

In one of the animations I made in “United States”, there is an electric socket. In America, electric sockets look like small faces. Light (in the animation) pours out of the socket’s “eyes”. It howls like a wolf. Finally, as machines begin not only to repeat information but to actually learn things, you will have to take your home computer into the shop for something resembling psychological counselling. It must be taught to relearn certain things so that it can go on and make correct new assumptions.

For your work the urban landscape is an extremely rich source of annotations and memories, subtle and ironic, on everyday life. But when you walk through a city do you pay more attention to the personal microcosm or to the architectonic macrocosm?
I’m sure that if I lived in the country with trees and animals, my work would be very different. I choose to live in New York because it is crowded with strange people, different from me. My job is that of a spy. I live here because (unlike L.A., where people never get out of their cars) people must confront each other.

“United States 1-4” has assumed the scale of opera. It places you in the empyrean of the great singers. Do you think you fit the definition of the experimental Callas of American new music?
I think of my work as the most ancient of art forms: story-telling. I change my voice not to make the sound more beautiful, but to tell the story better. Vocal virtuosity is beyond me. I assume different voices as if they were costumes: the voice of authority, the voice of conscience, the voice on the radio, the one on the phone.