Anderson (left)

“She kept talking about the big dipper and the little dipper and pointing / and suddenly I realized that she thought we were in outer space / looking down at the stars.” It might  have been the vocoder, digitizing speech for transmission. It might have been the cool-sounding Farfisa electronic organ. Or it might just have been lines like those quoted above, taken from her Night Flight from Houston, that prompted the call from NASA. Whatever it was, in 2004 Laurie Anderson found herself crowned with the distinct honor of becoming NASA’s first-ever artist-in-residence, ultimately creating and performing a piece about the moons of our solar system.

And the offer was entirely fitting, given Anderson’s quirky artistic career. From a stint writing on New York’s cultural scene for the Encyclopedia Britannica to writing the music script for the opening of the Olympic Games in Athens, Anderson has long since succeeded in lending new life to the term “multimedia”; the word is as much reflective of her own interests as descriptive of the manner in which she communicates those interests. A mainstay of New York’s downtown performance-art scene since the early ’70s, Anderson got her start by orchestrating and conducting a piece for car horns in Rochester, Vermont, entitled Automotive, then moving on to Duets on Ice, in which she performed a violin piece on New York street corners in ice skates frozen in blocks of ice, finishing only when her stage—the ice—had melted.

It’s just this exploration of sound’s relationship to image—a violinist with feet entrapped in a block of ice, dozens of cars blaring a modern symphony—for which Anderson is best known, and her Homeland tour, which includes her performance at Carnegie Hall on March 26, continues to explore that relationship. While Anderson’s recordings have long constituted an important part of her life work, it is through live performance—in this case her latest exploration of America, which is part poem, part play, and part concert—that she is truly able to explore, and break down, the boundaries between experience and performance, between performer and audience. “I almost never [create work] because I think it expresses who I am,” Anderson explained in a recent interview. “I’m not trying to express myself. That’s not my goal at all. My collaboration is truly with the audience.” And that’s just how her audience likes it.