Laurie Anderson’s ARK: United States V | PHOTO: Duncan Elliot
By Matthew Deakin
Factory International,
Manchester
Laurie Anderson is a name that needs no introduction: her multimedia visions have been well established in the art world canon now for five decades. In 2020, while experimenting with feeding the Bible into a supercomputer during her tenure as artist in residence at the Machine Learning Institute Adelaide, Australia, she began to write an ecology-focussed re-telling of Noah and the flood. Upon realisation that her writing was in essence reflective of events in the world around her, she decided to develop the diluvian story. The result was ARK: United States V.
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It is, in essence, a rather dreamlike concoction, which sees the stage populated by nuclear mushroom clouds, multiple large screens and both music and visual stations for Anderson’s avant jazz trio (featuring Kenny Wollesen and Doug Weiselman). Into this world, Anderson makes a dramatic entrance: a silhouetted dance to the mystical textures created by her violin.
As for the plot, it is no less bizarre, beginning on Doomsday, at 90 seconds to midnight. There are 7 more years until climate change becomes irreversible. We are running out of time. The data cloud breaks, the real world and the world of representation split, God and the Budda (played by Ai Weiwei and ANOHNI respectively) fall through time, Elon Musk is the Devil, ‘Ted’ of TED talks builds a mushroom ark.
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Told in a series of seemingly disparate, vignette style stories, the show is described by Anderson herself as ‘part rumination, part long form poetry’ connected by music, lectures and detours through her own personal history. She plays a new custom-made violin, with reverberating bowing and modulated clouds of sound, her vocals typically pitch shifted. The drum trigger jacket makes a return, as does her late husband Lou Reed in projection form accompanied by members of the local Sacred Harp choir, – a touching, goose-bump-inducing moment. In the second act, Anderson breaks the immersion by placing the audience on a Zoom call to the AI research department in Toronto with whom she is currently working (even some of the script for ARK was written by these algorithms), to demonstrate live speech to image translation technology.
The whole show is as sprawling, interdisciplinary and boundary pushing as would be expected from Laurie Anderson. After all, ARK: United States V is, in part, a dive into her history, experiences and outlooks on the world. Accordingly, she meets her heroes who appear as AI spectres. At one point, she is even projected live onto the large screen for a conversation with AI-generated Freud situated in a Viennese café.
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It’s a culmination of themes and ideas from throughout her illustrious career, worked into this indescribable piece of theatre. Is it a lecture or an opera? I’m not sure Anderson herself would answer that question as she is constantly asking the audience to question what it is they are watching.
During ARK: United States V, reality is out of joint. Within the post-truth world in which we live, ‘reality can be manufactured’, as seen clearly throughout the recent presidential election campaigns. Whether intentional or not, ARK reflects this mass confusion. It encapsulates 21st-century anxieties of ecosystem collapse, AI, disinformation and nuclear destruction. It asks questions, how did we get to this point? How much time do we have left? What role do stories play and how can they help us?
The result is at times bewildering and perhaps self indulgent. Yet ARK: United States V is incredibly engaging, unpredictable and darkly comic. Anderson crafts entire worlds with her musicians, making stunning use of the audio-visual facilities available at Aviva Studios. It was a unique performance, truly unlike anything I’ve ever seen. 