Space Odyssey

LAURIE ANDERSON IS NOTHING IF NOT A MERCURIAL PROPOsition. In her multiple careers, she has been a musician, a visual artist, a filmmaker (most recently in her 2015 essay film Heart of a Dog), a raconteur, an exponent of Buddhist practice, and an organizer of concerts for dogs. Perhaps what her work essentially consists of is simply wondering, on an enviably regular and fertile basis, “What if…?” and then working out the best—and often the most technologically resonant—method for pursuing that possibility further.

Anderson , and then some, in her current explorations of virtual reality, through a trilogy of works made in collaboration with Taiwanese new-media artist Hsin-Chien Huang. Formerly shown separately in various festival and gallery contexts including the Venice Film Festival, their three pieces featured in Cannes this year under the collective title as a sidebar to  in 1987). Experiencing the show—installed at the Suquet des Art(iste)s, an arts center built in a former morgue—offered a vivid reminder of some of the qualities that make VR so unlike cinema. Above all, there’s the sense of being alone in an imaginary space that you seem to inhabit physically—a space not bounded by the parameters of a screen, and whose rules of engagement you only start to learn once you abandon yourself to it.