S. Alexander Reed

• Offers a deep dive into the origins and history of Anderson's individual songs and aesthetic
• Based on new interviews with key creative figures
• Relates a prescient and futuristic 1980s work to the 21st-century future it predicted

Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson's Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of "now" when time is always moving? How does our experience become memory?

Laurie Anderson pioneered new techniques and aesthetics in performance art, becoming its first and most enduring superstar. In this book, author S. Alexander Reed dives into the wonderfully strange making and meanings of this singular album and of its creator's long artistic career. Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day.