Abstract
Laurie Anderson traverses various media, offering fragmentary stories via multimodal outputs that involve image as well as sound: film, installation, live performance, and music video forms all oscillate around, and extend the traditional album format. By drawing audiovisual ideas across platforms and through projects over four decades, she has continued to open up the idea of large-scale, expanded forms of the music video many years before the recent popularity of long-play video forms. Yet Anderson’s expanded projects do not arise through the conventional means of “transmedia storytelling,” whereby paratexts offer additional information to what Henry Jenkins has called “the mothership” work by enhancing the backstory of characters, offering parallel or alternative viewpoints, or fleshing out the general fictional world. Instead, she offers a form of affective transmedia that arises through developing repetitions and re-combinations of both musical and visual material that fundamentally complicate the traditional idea of music video as a discrete audiovisual form.