"Here" began when I decided to try to write a song using only the one hundred most used words in English. I wanted to get away from the words I almost automatically use as a writer and see if I could say something with very simple materials. The list I was working with was generated from written English as it is used, for example, in national news magazines. This original list, however, had very few nouns. It was mostly glue and pointers indicating position in time and space--to, from, between, over, after--and therefore pretty hard to write with. It also included "men" but not "women," "no" but not "yes" and other peculiarities

So I used the next expanded sample of two hundred and fifty-eight words. This list still didn't include the word "women" although "boy" and "boys" had been added. However, it does account for 55 percent of written English.

When I was asked to be a part of "Under Capricorn" (see below), I began to think of the arrangement of these words as maps. As a writer, I often write to find out what I think. Combining words randomly often suggests things, ideas, and points of view that normally wouldn't occur to me. I just pick a starting point and try to have no expectations about where these words might lead. In working with "Here," I tried to suggest some of the magic properties of words, their mysteries, beginning with the definitions of letters themselves. "k," for example, can mean "potassium," "a cumulus cloud," "a graphic representation of the letter k," "something shaped like the letter k," "carat" as in diamonds, and "memory" as in computers.

In "Here" there are several different ways to rearrange these words: Rhyme, Definition, Possession, Shuffle, Expansion, Acronyms, and Subtraction. There's a notebook below each word map to keep track of the things you might make from these templates. Feel free to send them to us. And I'll be posting some of my own combinations as well.

--Laurie Anderson

	A HTML 2.0 browser Shockwave Plug-in

	High Bandwidth - full soundtrack (Shockwave downloads range from 111K to 438K) Medium Bandwidth - minimal soundtrack (Shockwave downloads range from 38K to 206K) Low Bandwidth - silent (Shockwave downloads range from 4K to 83K)

Here has been created in conjunction with the Under Capricorn - The World Over exhibit at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Wellington City Gallery, which runs from June 28th to August 18th 1996.
Take a look at the Green Room project of Laurie Anderson at the Voyager site.