America – or to give the entity we’re specifically speaking about its correct geopolitical name, the United States – is never far from our minds. If you were to draw a map of the world and base that map on how much airspace, newspace and brainspace countries occupy rather than geographical proximity, well surely the United States would be a mere hop across the pond from the UK (and not 4,348 miles as the crow flies). 

In Laurie Anderson’s magnum opus United States Parts 1-4, contemporary American life is under the microscope. Contemporary as it was in 1983 when it opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on February 3, contemporary as its content still feels. A performance art piece split like an atom into 78 segments, four parts and performed across two nights, United States combined music, photography, film, drawings, animation and text to interrogate life in post-industrial North America. 

Though non-linear in its narrative, its four sections focused on transportation (or more specifically the American obsession with movement and freedom), politics and money (read: power structures and omnipresent media influence), love (or the complexities of human interaction) and, perhaps most interestingly, technology (particularly how it intersects with identity, and how it might impact our collective future).  

Technology ties the piece together as much as its sprawling subject matter – a topic as vast and complex as the United States could only be explored through a plethora of media. Music looped together with projection; spoken word sharing airspace with animation; the medium and the message. After all, multimedia storytelling is what Anderson brought to the world of art.  

Some critics at the time read Anderson’s obsession with technology as a warning – that we’re hurtling towards full dehumanisation. But United States was never a complete rallying against technology. Anderson plays with it – manipulating a synth to sound like human laughter (heard so vividly on her surprise hit single O Superman) and manipulating her own voice to sound robotic (during her performances of United States, she slipped a miniature speaker into her mouth, moving her lips to control the sound). 

The lines playfully blurred, Anderson forces us to think about technology, about how it can become an extension of the self – amplifying and altering our natural state – and crucially how it’s the chief navigator in what direction society may veer off into next.  

Fast forward to the present day and United States 1-4 more than holds its own. Even if some of the sum of its tech parts have aged (the impatience of waiting for an answering machine beep), there are plenty that still ring true (the monotonous yet cheery airline safety instructions – only now they don’t mention ashtrays).  

Technology evolves – but the feeling that the US with all its complexities still sets the tone for the rest of the world is escapable. As voters across the United States strap themselves in for a bumpy ride, America is once again at the forefront of our minds.

Enter Laurie Anderson and ARK: United States V.  With a laser focus on American life – and the world at large – in the final instalment of the United States series, Anderson asks where we are now, what has brought us here and how much time do we have left?