“Current runs through bodies and then it doesn’t.” This quote from Laurie Anderson’s first presentation of The Language of the Future, sums up the logic of our digital times as an “on-again, off-again” relationship. Anderson wrote this phrase in the early 1980s when digital technologies seemed futuristic, but today, from a post-digital perspective, the phrase holds equally true, viewed from the context of our ever-elusive entanglement with technology. Our bodies are networked in ways we do not fully command, as we both emit and are integrated into data currents.
This is the ingenious part of Laurie Anderson’s creation: when talking about the future she already refers to it as the past, eschewing a linear perspective in favor of a world where “one thing instantly replaces another,” in no particular order. In the new solo piece of her ongoing performance, the artist mixes spoken word, electronics, and violin, crossing borders between dreams, reality, and the elusive world of information.
This iteration of The Language of the Future marks Anderson’s first Berlin performance in over five years. Exploring the inextricable links between past, present, and future, Anderson’s performance is an exceptional conclusion to ever elusive – thirty years of transmediale.
The Language of the Future by Laurie Anderson
04&05.03.2017
20:00 – 22:00 CET
HKW / Haus der Kulturen der Welt | John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10 | 10557 Berlin/Tiergarten
