Virtual Realities: Artist Talk with Hsin-Chien Huang and Laurie Anderson
Pioneering American performance artist Laurie Anderson and inventive Taiwanese media artist Hsin-Chien Huang have metaphorically been to the moon and back to create engaging and immersive art out of cutting-edge technology.
The two innovators have been working together on creative projects for nearly three decades. From their 1995 multimedia CD-ROM Puppet Motel to their award-winning virtual reality projects, Anderson and Huang have continuously tested the limits of how art and technology can immerse viewers in words, worlds, and wonder.
A video version of La camera insabbiata (2017), a virtual reality work created by Anderson and Huang, is included in Laurie Anderson: The Weather, now on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. In La camera insabbiata, the viewer flies through an enormous structure made of words, drawings and stories that continuously form and reform. The work was named Best VR Experience at the 74th Venice International Film Festival.
The two artists will join Hirshhorn curator Marina Isgro live to discuss their ongoing collaboration and the creative ways they tell stories and reimagine the world through technology.
About the Artists
As a Grammy Award-winning musician, performer, writer, and artist, Laurie Anderson has an international reputation as an artist who combines the traditions of the avant-garde with popular culture. Anderson’s theatrical works combine a variety of media, including performance, music, poetry, sculpture, opera, anthropological investigations, and linguistic games, to elicit emotional reactions. As a visual artist, Anderson has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum, SoHo, and extensively in Europe, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She has also released seven albums for Warner Brothers, including Big Science, featuring the song “O Superman,” which rose to No. 2 on the British pop charts. She is currently Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University.
Hsin-Chien Huang is a Taiwanese new media creator with a background in art, design, engineering, and digital entertainment. He explores cutting edge technologies in art, literature, design and stage performing. He received the grand prize in the 1994 “New Voices, New Vision” new media competition, the 2009 Media & Technology Muse Award from the America Association of Museums, the 2011 Light of Taiwan’s Honor from Taiwan’s President Ma, the Fifth Public Art Award from the Ministry of Culture Taiwan in 2016, and 2017 Best VR Experience at the Venice Film Festival. Huang has been a longtime collaborator with Laurie Anderson and been a researcher on interactive music in Interval Research Corporation. Afterward worked as Art Director at Sega and Sony Computer Entertainment and developed the game titles “Geist Force” and “Kinetica.”
This program was made possible with the support of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States.
