Mary Lucier, Visiting Artist Lecture 2001

Declaring her work to be walking a line between documentary and poetry, Mary Lucier discusses a number of her video installations. The installations described relate natural events—usually traumas—to human experiences, and transform human speech into musical and percussive elements within the pieces, by filtering and tuning the sounds. The first and most extensively described installation is Noah’s Raven, which contrasts footage of impenetrable landscapes in Alaska and the Amazon with breast surgery for cancer—which the speaker considers a turning point in her art.