Laurie Anderson's Big Science

Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson’s Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the challenging and strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of “now” when time is always moving? How do experiences become memories? This book attends closely to Anderson’s artistic voice, detailing its unique capacities for ambiguity and revelation. It traces the sonic histories etched in the record’s grooves, from the Cold War to a burning future, from the Manhattan skyline to the empty desert, from the opera house to the pop charts. Ultimately, in Big Science, one can hear an invitation to rise above the dualities of parts and wholes, images and essences, the lone individual and the megasystem. The first and most enduring superstar of performance art, Anderson is recognized here for pioneering philosophically rich techniques within the medium but is also taken seriously as a musician and composer. Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day.

Material Thinking: How to Develop a Student’s Artistic Voice

The approach to education so far has placed the focus primarily on theory; practice becomes a secondary function which serves to drill in the theory. Theory-based approach may be suitable for subjects like Math and Science, which are fact-based, where knowledge is exact and explicit. However, Art is highly subjective, thus what would be the best approach to teach subjective knowledge? The traditional art class places high value on technical perfection where the goal is for the student to regurgitate exactly what they see, which is to copy reality. But with the invention of Photography, is this the goal of Art - to replicate exactly what one sees? Thus, what is the goal of Art Education now and what is the best way to teach Art to students?

Insight

Carlos Lopez-Real explores his own ‘pathway to creative performance’ in holistic terms, considering issues to do with identity, ‘constantly evolving practice’, shifts of focus in his artistic journey, and various types of uncertainty along the way. In particular, he contemplates his various roles and activities as improviser, composer, performer and educator, along with his individual artistic voice and a further artistic voice embedded within a collective of musicians, a community of practice.

Insight

This Insight emphasizes an aspect of being a classical musician that has become particularly challenging in our contemporary culture: namely, the development of a personal artistic voice, the most vital aspect of which is the cultivation of expressive freedom. Mine Doğantan-Dack notes that the two areas that provided her with the tools needed to develop a critical approach were philosophy and music theory.

Insight

Frances-Marie Uitti charts a lifelong discovery of the potential of an instrument, in this case the cello, through multiple collaborations with composers and through her own ground-breaking exploratory work, including the creation of altogether new instruments. At the heart of this process, she reveals the development of her musical ear which then translates to a distinctive artistic voice.

Insight

Melvyn Tan notes that learning music is a lifelong process. He describes his own experiences as a student engaged in hours of practising, as a ‘novice performer’ who started to learn how to gauge his performances, and as one interested in historical pianos as well as modern instruments. He notes that success is not always possible and that much time is needed to develop one’s artistic voice.

"Mun mielest nykyään tanssijoiltakin vaaditaan monipuolisempaa otetta kuin aikasemmin" – Nykytanssijan toimijuus muuttuvalla tanssikentällä

The agency of the dancer in the changing contemporary dance field in Finland The article discusses the changing professional identity of a contemporary dancer in Finland. The research question is what kind of agency dancers perform in their profession at the moment; Can they be considered as independent auteur artists instead of an instrument of a choreographer? The article is based on the interview study of four freelance dancers. The theoretical framework is the sociological concept of agency, the notion of changing work culture in the postmodern world and the view of social construction of meanings about the dance eld. The data is analysed and organised by themes: the three themes found are a dancer with own artistic voice, an enterprising multitalent, and a responsible negotiator. A dancer with her own artistic voice represents the dancers’ agency towards their own artistic identity, and an enterprising multitalent describes the agency towards the dance eld. A responsible negotiator represents the dancers’ agency towards a dance piece. The conclusion is that the agency of the dancers is expanding and increasing: dancers work more like a creative and independent auteur artist than before.