Laurie Anderson, a woman who can only be described as “avant garde”, has been tapped by NASA as their artist-in-residence.
NASA began its art program in 1963 but never before had it tapped a resident artist, nor had it pushed the aesthetic envelope so boldly by choosing a performer whose large-scale theatrical productions blended “Star Trek” and Melville. Anderson is no Faith Hill.
The pixie-haired classically trained violinist has approached her assignment like a journalist, visiting the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and NASA Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in California.
The experience has been “overwhelming and wonderful at once,” Anderson said recently in a telephone interview from her loft in New York.
The idea of an avant-garde electronic fiddler hanging out with rocket geeks at NASA’s research centers may seem like an odd collaboration. At the Ames center in Silicon Valley, Anderson stood inside a virtual airport control tower to view scenes of Mars terrain, taking photos and recording notes in a small red notebook. The researchers’ reaction to their visitor was mixed, according to a NASA newsletter. One confessed to being a huge fan; another doubted the partnership of art and science. “What’s she going to do, write a poem?” the researcher asked.
In fact, Anderson’s passions run parallel with the pocket-protector crowd. She has collaborated with the Interval Research Corp. in California to design a wireless musical instrument called the Talking Stick, which emits sound when touched.
She intends to produce a range of works from her two-year NASA commission, including a film on the moons of the solar system that will debut at the 2005 World Exposition in Japan.
Anderson said her affiliation with the space agency has sustained her spiritually, especially as the war in Iraq has dragged on and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal has unfolded.
“Frankly, I find living in American culture at the moment really problematic,” she said. “But then when I think of NASA, it’s the one thing that feels future-oriented in a way that’s inspiring. The greening of Mars or building a stairway to Mars, these are unbelievable aspirations.”
I love Luarie Anderson (Big Science is on my top ten of all time) but with that being said this make’s me want to scream.
It’s bad enough my taxes are being wasted supporting usless crap like NPR, and now it looks as if the money I work hard to earn is supporting this as well. Perhaps this is being done at NASA because only they have the computers capable of figuring out exactly what an ignorant waste of money this is.
Feeding the homeless, ok. Curing diseases, no problem. Defending our country, a nessesity- Laurie Andersen’s Mars music- are you serious???
…it did say she was under commision right?