A Conversation With Laurie Anderson

Art of the Possible Festival

A conversation with Laurie Anderson about her work in Art and Artificial Intelligence with the Australian Institute of Machine Learning.

Elder Hall

Art of the Possible 2022

Art of the Possible is an annual student-led four-day festival that showcases work from University of Adelaide students across all faculties.

Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned – and daring – creative pioneers. Anderson has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist."The Art of the Possible always involves looking at the impossible and that's what we've been doing with our A.I. project — finding the lines between the possible and the impossible and blurring them," she said.She will appear as a guest speaker for a Q&A session alongside Australian Institute of Machine Learning Director Anton van den Hengel and Professor Tom Hajdu from Sia Furler Institute. Their work has been presented in the Norton Lecture Series at Harvard University, as well as having been displayed at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. This work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine and 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper.The conversation will be moderated by Patrick Flanery, Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, who is releasing an article about their collaboration in a new piece coming out shortly. A﻿rt of the Possible is an annual student-led four day festival that showcases work from University of Adelaide students across all faculties. Our intention is to inspire future creative potential.<h2>Who's on the panel?</h2>Laurie AndersonLaurie Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She became more widely known outside the art world when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981. Her debut album Big Science was released the following year. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she collaborated with Interval Research to develop an instrument she called a "talking stick," a six-foot (1.8 m) long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds.In 2003, Anderson became NASA's first artist-in-residence, which inspired her performance piece The End of the Moon.She was part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.On February 10, 2019, at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, held in Los Angeles, Anderson and Kronos Quartet's Landfall won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. It was Anderson's first collaboration with Kronos Quartet and her first Grammy award, and was the second Grammy for Kronos.In 2020, Laurie Anderson was appointed to be the first A.I. artist-in-residence and began her work with Anton van den Hengel and Thomas Hajdu. In 2021, she was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and presented a series of six lectures titled Spending the War Without You: Virtual Backgrounds over the course of the spring and fall semesters. Anderson created a show on the second floor of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., titled "The Weather" and described by The New York Times as "a sort of nonretrospective retrospective of one of America’s major, and majorly confounding, modern artists."Anton van den HengelAnton van den Hengel is the founding Director of The Australian Institute for Machine Learning, Australia’s largest machine learning research group, and on many measures its most successful. He is also a Chief Investigator of the Australian Centre of Excellence in Robotic Vision, and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide. Professor van den Hengel has been a CI on over $60m in research funding from sources including Google, Facebook, Canon, BHP Billiton and the ARC. Prof van den Hengel has won a number of awards, including the Pearcey Foundation Entrepreneur Award, the SA Science Excellence Award for Research Collaboration, and the CVPR Best Paper prize in 2010. He has authored over 300 publications, has an h-index of 49, has had 8 patents commercialised, formed 2 start-ups, and has recently had a medical technology achieve first-in-class FDA approval. Current research interests include deep learning, vison and language problems, interactive image-based modelling, large-scale video surveillance, and medical machine learning.Prof van den Hengel and his team have developed world leading methods in a range of areas within Computer Vision and Machine learning, including methods which have placed first on a variety of international leaderboards such as: PASCAL VOC (2015 &amp; 2016), CityScapes (2016 &amp; 2017), Virginia Tech VQA (2016 &amp; 2017), and the Microsoft COCO Captioning Challenge (2016). Professor van den Hengel’s team placed 4th in the ImageNet detection challenge in 2015 ahead of Google, Intel, Oxford, CMU and Baidu, and 2nd in ImageNet Scene Parsing in 2016. ImageNet is one of the most hotly contested challenges in Computer Vision.Tom HajduTom's career connects leadership, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.Tom is CEO of Disrupter, his US-based innovation company. Over several years, this company has developed a way to create deeper and more creative strategic technologies. This year Disrupter is launching uNET, a next generation network company.Tom is Professor and Chair of Creative Technologies at the University of Adelaide where he is Director of the Sia Furler Institute advocating innovation and entrepreneurship in the Faculty of Arts. Recently Tom launched a new initiative intersecting Art and Artificial Intelligence launching AI artistic research initiatives including Laurie Anderson as the first AI artist-in-residence called the Art Intelligence Agency. He received a Distinguished Talent Visa from the Australian Federal Government and in his first 18 months as a resident, Tom led a key initiative that was adopted by the South Australian Government, which saw Adelaide become Australia’s first gigabit city and the first city in the world outside the US to join the US Ignite Gigabit Smart City Community. The South Australian Government appointed Tom to the role of Chief Innovator of South Australia from 2017 to 2018.Tom co-founded tomandandy, in 1990, reshaping the role of music in film, television and advertising industries by introducing a new process that lowered music production costs to a fraction of previous levels while improving creative quality. Over the next decade, tomandandy became one of the largest music production companies in the world. He has collaborated with Oliver Stone, U2 and Lou Reed to name a few, he has worked with top brands such as Microsoft and Ford, as well as in film and TV Studios and best of breed advertising agencies worldwide.Patrick Flanery (moderator)Patrick Flanery's first novel, Absolution, was published in 2012; it won the Spear's/Laurent Perrier Best First Book Award and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Author's Club Best First Novel Award, and the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France; it was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Desmond Elliott Prize. His second novel, Fallen Land, was published in 2013. His third novel, I Am No One, was published in 2016. His fourth novel, Night for Day, as well as a hybrid creative- critical book, The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption, were both published in 2019. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. In 2020 he directed and wrote a short documentary film, Sensitive Surfaces, about South African artist Kate Gottgens. Flanery's work has appeared in Zoetrope: All Story, Granta, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Daily Telegraph. He has held residential fellowships at MacDowell in New Hampshire, the Santa Maddalena Foundation outside of Florence, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa.He has taught at Queen Mary University of London and at the University of Reading in the UK. He is Professor Extraordinary at the University of Stellenbosch and since January 2021 has been Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

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