Catching up

I just finished watching another lecture by Laurie Anderson called “The Road", the 4th in a beautiful online gratuitous series of 6, the Norton Lectures "Spending the War Without You: Virtual Backgrounds". The artist was the recipient of this year’s Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry at Harvard University and is presenting these lectures aka performances along this year's semesters to the general (virtual) public together with the Mahindra Humanities Center. I am so grateful that this offer has come my way at no cost in these somehow still sparse times in high quality as much as payable cultural options. I'll be digesting all of this for quite a long time...

... but I can't resist to an impulsive comment right away after tonight's lecture: it was so refreshing and somehow relieving to listen to one of the most unique and prolific alive artists I know since my teenage years (she has always been a visionary, also technologically speaking) stating that it is technology itself that is not catching up with us on many levels. Over the course of the present pandemic, the need to forcibly slow down [consumerism, among other contemporary ways of spending time] and just be with our own and others’ selves - not selfies and status - has just demonstrated this clearly and unequivocally. Specially through the catastrophe that this seems to have been for so many people globally.

Zoom with Laurie

Why Are We Waiting - NEGATIVLAND