ArtSPEAK@FSW lecture by Dr. S. ALEXANDER REED on “Laurie ANDERSON & William S. BURROUGHS vs. YOU”

Sponsored by the Richard & Julia Rush Endowment
Saturday, September 28th at 1pm
Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW
This event is open to the public, FREE of charge.
Dr. S. ALEXANDER REED is a musician and subculture, pop, and technology scholar. Author of the acclaimed book ASSIMILATE: A Critical History of Industrial Music (Oxford University Press, 2013), he has also published in Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 book series, Slate, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Journal of Musicological Research, Perspectives of New Music, Popular Music and Society, ImageTexT, the Journal of Popular Music Education, and elsewhere. As a musician, producer, and remixer, he has dozens of recording credits. Dr. Reed teaches at Ithaca College, and has previously been on faculty at NYU's Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music, The University of Florida, and The College of William and Mary.
His most recent book, LAURIE ANDERSON’S Big Science, was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press and has garnered much critical-acclaim. Described as “Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson's Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of "now" when time is always moving? How does our experience become memory? Laurie Anderson pioneered new techniques and aesthetics in performance art, becoming its first and most enduring superstar. In this book, author S. Alexander Reed dives into the wonderfully strange making and meanings of this singular album and of its creator's long artistic career. Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day.”
According to Sean Albiez, Ph.D., (co-editor of the books - Brian Eno: Oblique Music and Kraftwerk: Music Non Stop), "Reed's fascinating multi-perspectival account of [Laurie Anderson’s] Big Science is a carefully argued and much needed exposition of this enigmatic work. Historical, contextual, and textual insights deftly examine the intersecting personal, cultural and philosophical themes Anderson explores, both in Big Science and in her work leading to and from it."