Let x = x

"Let X=x" is a piece of music from avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson's 1982 album "Big Science".

"Anderson tells us that real life is more twisted than the surreal. [...] 'That's been a topic of a lot of the work that I've done,' she explains, 'represented in a song like 'Let X=X,' which is a song about interpretation. Why do you have to translate and decode things? Just let the image be. It will have a special kind of reality that it won't once it's decoded.'" ("Electronic Musician", issue 09/1985)

This Blog is not about Laurie Anderson. And surely as a computational linguist my job mostly is to decode things (as things are language). Still, I like A.'s sceptical perspective on technological progress, on the "interior urban landscape." - sobering up one's mind to make it ready for unraveling the next big mystery.