Laurie Anderson is a multimedia artist, musician, and storyteller born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, in 1947 who is based in New York City. Working across drawing, performance, music, film, and virtual reality for more than four decades, she is known for pieces such as the VR installation Chalkroom, made with collaborator Hsin-Chien Huang, and the documentary film Heart of a Dog, which weaves together themes of death, Buddhism, and surveillance. Her collected volume All the Things I Lost in the Flood surveys her output through 2017. Anderson has received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Kyoto Prize, and continues to exhibit, including recent shows at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.

I began as a painter and sculptor and for forty years I have made drawings, music, paintings, installations, film, sculpture, electronic design, software, opera and theater. At the root of all of these works are stories. They are the engines. Stories and words are what I love most. This is a book about the many different strategies I have used to put stories and words into things. Since there are no story museums or museums of narrative art, many of my visual works have been represented as pure visual art instead of the collaborations with words that they actually are. This book is about the development of this process and the catalytic relationships between pictures and stories and about the many codes we use to represent the world.