Laurie Anderson's Telepresence

Abstract

A survey of the work of American artist Laurie Anderson makes clear her career-long interest in what may be described as the modern subject’s self-alienation in the face of excessive technologization and authoritarianism. This article argues that her 1998 installation Dal Vivo forms an extreme endpoint in this ongoing project of artistic critique. It claims that the conceit of this installation, which can be understood as an unusual and highly mediatized variation on performance art, places Anderson in an irresolvable ethical bind. For the installation crystallises, in aesthetic form, the paranoia which Eric Santner argues is endemic to subjects forced to function within the damaging solicitations of disciplinary authority, and it makes Anderson complicit within this process. The ethical predicament created by the installation’s deployment of tele-technologies, moreover, suggests the potential of telepresence technologies to function repressively, thus providing a cautionary note to too uncritical techno-utopian accounts of tele-technologies.

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