Moon and Stars Align For Performance ArtistLaurie Anderson Accepts Art Commission From NASA
WashingtonPost.com/ 2004Jun29 / Warning: alien-probe registration required
Performance artist Laurie Anderson thought the phone call was a prank.
How would you like to be NASA's artist-in-residence?
The offer was legit: The space agency was bestowing a $20,000 commission ....Anderson's creation for NASA will debut at the 2005 World Expo and show for six months...music for a Japanese garden...
"When I began to think about a Japanese rock garden, it was very much about time," the artist said. "You have a plum tree in blossom, repeating time in its briefest form. A blossom falls, that blossom falls on a rock, a stream flows through."
Her logic continues, breathlessly. "Here are these rovers up on Mars. You have robots up there looking for life, for water. Rovers are being trained to think like geologists, pick up a rock and crush it. One of the problems the JPL scientists are having is where the rock is and where the rover thinks the rock is. What is consciousness?"
---See also the FG thread:Japanese city aims to display full-body mammoth at Expo 2005
