ARK: United States V | REVIEW [Video]

By Matthew Deakin

Factory International,Manchester

Laurie Anderson is a name that needs no introduction: her multimedia visions have been well established in the art world canon now for five decades. In 2020, while experimenting with feeding the Bible into a supercomputer during her tenure as artist in residence at the Machine Learning Institute Adelaide, Australia, she began to write an ecology-focussed re-telling of Noah and the flood.  Upon realisation that her writing was in essence reflective of events in the world around her, she decided to develop the diluvian story. The result was ARK: United States V.

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It is, in essence, a rather dreamlike concoction, which sees the stage populated by nuclear mushroom clouds, multiple large screens and both music and visual stations for Anderson’s avant jazztrio (featuring Kenny Wollesen …