Education Quote by Laurie Anderson

Anderson slips a quiet provocation into what sounds like a friendly plug: “Net art” isn’t just a new major, it’s a pressure test for what we still think theater is. Coming from a musician who’s spent decades blurring concert, storytelling, tech, and performance art, the line reads less like career advice and more like a map of where culture has already moved. The internet isn’t a tool bolted onto the stage; it’s a stage with different physics.

The specific intent is to legitimize digital practice as serious, institution-worthy craft, not a hobby or a gimmick. By praising a degree program, she’s also praising permission: the idea that young artists can commit to forms that don’t fit old categories. “Really a fantastic way” is Anderson’s understated enthusiasm, but the key move is her reframing. Net art becomes “a way of thinking of theater,” not replacing it, but rerouting it.

The subtext: theater has been stuck romanticizing liveness and the proscenium while audiences have been rehearsing new kinds of attention online - fragmented, interactive, networked, archival. Net art forces theater to confront presence when presence is distributed; to rethink authorship when the audience clicks, comments, remixes; to treat code, interfaces, and latency as dramaturgy.

Contextually, Anderson is speaking from inside a long arc of avant-garde experimentation that now sits adjacent to higher ed and creative industry pipelines. She’s pointing at institutional change as cultural evidence: the avant-garde is no longer outside the building. It’s getting a syllabus.