{"id":5515,"date":"2015-04-28T13:47:49","date_gmt":"2015-04-28T13:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/?p=5515"},"modified":"2015-04-28T13:47:49","modified_gmt":"2015-04-28T13:47:49","slug":"laurie-andersons-big-science-gender-automation-and-created-beings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/2015\/04\/28\/laurie-andersons-big-science-gender-automation-and-created-beings\/","title":{"rendered":"Laurie Anderson’s Big Science: Gender, Automation, and Created Beings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cO Superman. O judge. O Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad,\u201d begins performance artist Laurie Anderson\u2019s \u201cO Superman.\u201d Half-sung, half-spoken, and captivatingly hypnotic, the eight-minute song featured on Anderson\u2019s 1982 album Big Science<\/em> reached number two on the U.K. charts in the early 1980s.<\/p>\n

\"blogBigScience\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Anderson\u2019s work strikes an interesting balance between abstraction and accessibility. Despite the popularity of \u201cO Superman\u201d and the rest of Big Science, <\/em>Anderson encodes her work with rich references to literary texts, operas, cultural trends and pop culture events. The album most extensively engages with the relationship among communication, technology, and political affairs. \u201cBig Science,\u201d after all, is a term used to describe the shift during and after World War II toward government-funded, large-scale scientific projects principally devoted to the development of new weapons and tools.<\/p>\n

Furthering her engagement with technology are the instruments and techniques Anderson uses to produce her music. The spoken text of \u201cO Superman,\u201d for example, is dictated through a vocoder, a synthesizer used to reproduce human speech. Anderson uses the technology to make her voice sound synthetic, therefore mimicking the automatic voice of an answering machine and blurring the assumed boundaries between the natural and the artificial. But the most fascinating aspect of Anderson\u2019s performance art is both its timeliness and timelessness\u2014her songs are just as topically relevant and profound today as they were over thirty years ago.<\/p>\n

\"blogBigScience<\/a>I had the opportunity to listen to Anderson\u2019s vinyl LP using the Dodd Center\u2019s electronic equipment. I\u2019ve compiled the digitized tracks of Anderson\u2019s Big Science <\/em>here for those interested in listening at home.<\/p>\n

From the Air<\/a><\/p>\n

Big Science<\/a><\/p>\n

Sweaters<\/a><\/p>\n

Walking and Falling<\/a><\/p>\n

Born Never Asked<\/a><\/p>\n

-Giorgina Paiella<\/p>\n

Intern Giorgina Paiella is an undergraduate student majoring in English and minoring in philosophy and women\u2019s, gender, and sexuality studies. In her new blog series, \u201cMan, Woman, Machine: Gender, Automation, and Created Beings,\u201d she explores treatments of created and automated beings in historical texts and archival materials from Archives and Special Collections.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cO Superman. O judge. O Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad,\u201d begins performance artist Laurie Anderson\u2019s \u201cO Superman.\u201d Half-sung, half-spoken, and captivatingly hypnotic, the eight-minute song featured on Anderson\u2019s 1982 album Big Science reached number two on the U.K. charts … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[251,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5515"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5515"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5526,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5515\/revisions\/5526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}