60 Minutes - 7/24/2022: Reality Winner, Array of Hope, Laurie Anderson

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

Scott Pelley sits down with Reality Winner, who say she leaked classified information to serve the American people. Bill Whitaker looks at a chain of islands that turned disaster into hope. Anderson Cooper profiles Laurie Anderson, taking you inside the artist's exhibition on display at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Her name, her real name, is Reality Winner. She's an Air Force veteran accused of espionage who spent four years behind bars for leaking classified information to the media. Did she do exceptionally grave damage, as the prosecutor said? Or did she reveal a truth that defended America? I am not a traitor. The young woman with the unforgettable name in her first television interview tonight. When Hurricane Dorian slammed into the northern Bahamas on September 1st, 2019, it was the fifth Category 5 Atlantic hurricane in just three years. What can the chain of islands that sit in the heart of Hurricane Alley do to protect

themselves? We found a ray of hope, specifically a solar array designed to survive future destructive hurricanes spawned by the warming ocean waters. These are beautiful. Laurie Anderson's largest ever U.S. exhibition is currently on display at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It's an odyssey through her singular creative life. This seems very ominous to me. Good. Wow!

In one room, she's painted words and images that seem to explode onto the walls and floor. It's a kind of multidimensional sketchbook of to explode onto the walls and floor. It's a kind of multi-dimensional sketchbook of her thoughts, dreams, and stories. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. A story about someone named Reality Winner has got to start with the name. Her father, playing on the family name, explained he wanted a real winner, and so reality. Maybe that still doesn't make sense, but it is the least baffling fact in this story. Reality Winner became an infamous name in 2017 when she was accused of espionage. She was hit with the longest sentence ever imposed on a civilian for leaking classified

information to the media. Now released, she spoke with us for a story that first aired in December. Did Reality Winner do exceptionally grave damage, as the prosecutor said, or did she reveal a truth that defended America? It's complicated, just like the young woman with the unforgettable name. I am not a traitor. I am not a spy. I am somebody who only acted out of love for what this country stands for. We met 30-year-old reality winner at home in Texas after four years behind bars.

Espionage seems surprising for a woman who joined the Air Force at 19 and won the Air Force Commendation Medal in 2016 for, quote, 600 enemies killed in action. She did that as a linguist in a combat unit fighting secret missions. How many languages do you speak? Farsi, Dari, and Pashto. These are the languages of Afghanistan and Iran? Yes. But her duty station was 7,000 miles away from those countries at Fort Meade, Maryland. Why are you at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Why are you at Fort Meade? Not, am I allowed to say that? Nope. Nope. That's the voice of her lawyer who helped her steer clear of secrets in our interview. Winner wouldn't say it, but at Fort Meade, linguists eavesdropped on communications in Afghanistan to identify targets for armed drones. It is not something I am allowed to discuss.

She didn't discuss her mission with her mother, Billie Winner Davis. Only one conversation that I had with her did she ever let on how heavy her work was. I'll never forget because she said, you know, when you're watching somebody on your screen and that person goes poof, you've got to make sure that you've got everything right. I was starting to see in the news that our mission had a very high civilian casualty rating. She began to feel guilt while battling illness, depression, and the eating disorder bulimia. She left the Air Force for a top-secret civilian job at the National Security Agency at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia.

But here in 2017, she says what she was hearing in English worried her far more than intercepts in Farsi and Pashto. If you don't catch a hacker, OK, in the act, it's very hard to say who did the hacking. The president was raising doubt that Russia attacked the 2016 election. His interview with John Dickerson was typical of the time. I'll go along with Russia, could have been China, could have been a lot of different groups. But it was Russia, and the NSA knew it. Reality Winner had seen proof in a top-secret report on an in-house news feed.

I just kept thinking, my God, somebody needs to step forward and put this right. Somebody. The secret report said in 2016, the Russian military executed cyber espionage against 122 local government organizations, targeting officials involved in the management of voter registration systems. It was top secret in part because it revealed what the U.S. knew about Russian tactics. Winner told us she was exposing a White House cover-up. She printed the report, dropped it in this mailbox, addressed anonymously to an online news source that specialized in government wrongdoing. The NSA report was published a month later.

You knew it was stamped top secret. You knew what that meant. I knew that. I knew it was secret. But I also knew that I had pledged service to the American people. And at that point in time, it felt like they were being led astray. Winner was caught as soon as the top secret report surfaced. The NSA could see on its network that she printed it. She drove home to a new reality.

A plain black sedan came up behind my car. And two men in polo shirts came out and introduced themselves as FBI agents. A transcript shows the FBI agents told her the interrogation was voluntary and they didn't mention her right to an attorney. Winner lied about mailing the report, then confessed and was arrested. The government hit her with the most serious possible charge, espionage. Bail was denied after prosecutors told a judge that Winner wrote in her diary that she was mad enough to burn the White House. They suggested she might defect to the Taliban.

To the public, they said this. Winner's willful, purposeful disclosure caused exceptionally grave damage to U.S. national security. But what prosecutors called grave damage was a bombshell of truth to the Federal Election Assistance Commission, which helped secure the vote. In hours, the commission issued an alert on the NSA document leak. It spelled out the top-secret email addresses utilized by the attackers and urged officials to check email logs. Blindsided by Winner's revelation, the commission called for full disclosure of election security intelligence. Two former Two, former officials told us Reality Winner helped secure the 2018 midterm election. One of the things that you learned about the espionage charge is that in court you're

not allowed to talk about what you leaked or why you leaked it. What would you have told the judge? That I thought this was the truth, but also did not betray our sources and methods, did not cause damage, did not put lives on the line. It only filled in a question mark that was tearing our country in half in May 2017. And that I meant no harm. But there was harm, for her. As her case dragged on 16 months, she says depression was consuming her. Her mother moved from Texas to Augusta to be with her daughter. There would just be times when it almost wasn't worth it to see the end of this and so... You had thoughts of taking your own life. Yes. I started to plan my suicide, and I would do practice runs. The only thing that was stopping me was my mom, because she was still in Augusta. My dad had gone back to Texas to go to work, and I just refused to let her hear that news by herself.

So I would get on the phone and just try to talk around it, and, hey, there's no need to stick around. Visitation's not worth it. Go back to Texas. Just go. Just go. Her mother, Billie, heard that while sitting in on our interview with her daughter. Reality told us that she was planning to kill herself. I heard that. Yeah. Did you know she was in that much trouble?

I mean, there were some very dark days, but then they would be followed by a better day. I just knew when I was there in Georgia, I couldn't leave. I couldn't leave her. In 2018, at the age of 26, Winner pleaded guilty. The judge said he would make an example of her. She served four years behind bars, plus three now, answering to a probation officer. She still can't talk about the case.

I've had four years of just trying to say I'm not a terrorist. I can't even begin to talk about my actual espionage indictment or have a sense of accomplishment in having survived prison because I'm still stained by them accusing me of being the same groups that I enlisted in the Air Force to fight against. So I don't let myself feel anything regarding the actual act or the charge until I can let it be known that I'm not what they said I was. She served her sentence during prison lockdowns for COVID and the unrest after the police murder of George Floyd, in a cell with two companions, depression and bulimia, she became self-destructive. You know, every time that I had to give in to my illness, I put it on my body. I cut myself

everywhere. I couldn't leave my cell. I couldn't work out. And all I could do was ask why and ask why. And a chaplain walked by. And I asked him why they were doing this to us. And that same chaplain that I had seen for two years looked me in my face and said, nobody gives a f**k about y'all in here. I started getting high that day. Everyone knows there's drugs in prison. I was reduced to binging and purging, getting high every day, and cutting myself. Have you been able to get clean?

I have. I just am ashamed to say how hard it is. It's worth noting how inconsistent the government is in these cases. In 2008, Greg Bergersen, a Pentagon employee, was convicted of selling secrets to the Chinese. That's him, in FBI surveillance, getting his pocket stuffed with cash. His sentence was six months shorter than reality winners. In 2012, former Army General and CIA Director David Petraeus

gave notebooks of top-secret information to an author who was his mistress. He was charged with misdemeanor mishandling of classified information and never spent a minute in jail. Was it worth it? I try so hard not to frame things as being worth it or not worth it. What I know is that I'm home with my parents and we take our lives every day moving forward as being richer in knowing what to be grateful for. It's okay, you're here. You're here. You did. grateful for. It's okay, you're here. You're here. You're here. You're here. Grateful for the moment of her prison release. We said this story is complicated.

On the one hand, individuals can't be deciding what to declassify. On the other, some things are classified to conceal wrongdoing. Torture in the war on terror, for example. In a home in Texas, one mother has simplified the story her way, with a portrait of a veteran and a display of a commendation for meritorious service to her country. What reality did was not espionage. What reality did was patriotism. She actually stood up and worked for the American people to give us the truth about an attack on our vote, an attack on our democracy, an attack on our country. And I'm very proud of her for that. Last month, reality winner and her attorney asked President Biden for a pardon. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life.

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At participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. You've got unlimited access to music. But time? Now that's limited. The PC Insider's World's Elite MasterCard gets you unlimited PC Optima points, free grocery delivery, and time back for what matters. Save time and earn $1,100 in average value each year. The PC Insider's World's Elite MasterCard. The card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit PCFinancial.ca for details. Value is for illustrative purposes only. When Hurricane Dorian slammed into the northern Bahamas in 2019, the Category 5 storm caused nearly inestimable damage on a number of

islands. There's a growing consensus among scientists that climate change is making hurricanes stronger and more destructive. That's very bad news for the Bahamas, a string of more than 700 low-lying islands stretching from Florida nearly down to Cuba in the heart of what's come to be known as Hurricane Alley. When we visited in late 2019, hurricane recovery was really just beginning. But we discovered that the Bahamas had found a ray of hope, specifically a solar array that can survive future hurricanes. And in the process, it may have important lessons for the rest of the world. With sustained winds of 185 miles per hour, gusts above 200, and a storm surge well over 20 feet in some spots. Please pray for us.

Hurricane Dorian wreaked unimaginable havoc on the Bahamian Islands known as the Abacos. There's not enough words in the dictionary to describe what Hopetown looked like after that storm. Hopetown has been Vernon Malone's home for all of his 82 years. His family has lived here since 1785. He's the town baker and grocer, and he and his wife rode out the storm in his store. It survived, but their home just up the street did not. The entrance went right in there. Vernon's son, Brian Brian had a home just around

the corner. Had a home. That pile of rubble we see there. That's actually two and a half houses. Mine's on the bottom. Hopetown is a Bahamian landmark. Its candy-striped lighthouse dates to 1863 and is pictured on the country's $10 bill. The lighthouse stood up to Dorian, but as we saw coming into the harbor, not much else did. I hear generators everywhere. Is this how you guys are getting through? Yep. Yep. Brian Malone and Matt Winslow, an American who owns a vacation home on the island, told us why all those generators are still running. The substation in Marsh Harbor, which feeds us the power, is destroyed. And then, of course, you can see all the utility poles are pretty much destroyed. So this isn't a case where you come in and replace some poles and you flick a switch.

This is months and months and months of work. Hopetown is on one of several small islands ravaged by Dorian, which then moved across seven miles of open water to Marsh Harbor, the largest town in the Abacos. At least 60 people died in Marsh Harbor, and destruction is still everywhere. Total damage and loss from Dorian is estimated at $3.4 billion. When you see the extent of the destruction, where do you even begin? How do you even begin? That's always the question. Where do we begin? The Bahamian prime minister at the time, Hubert Minnis, and his aide, Vianna Gardner, visited Marsh Harbor with us and pointed to a top priority, restoring electric

power. How do you bring this back? The power, we had to make determination to set up microgrids. The microgrids Prime Minister Minnis is talking about are small-scale systems. More and more, they're solar arrays with battery storage for when the sun's not shining. They can either feed electricity into the larger grid or operate independently to power a single facility or a neighborhood. The way electricity has been produced in the Bahamas is with diesel-fueled generating stations on each inhabited island, about 30 in all, feeding power to everyone through overhead lines. The main power plant for this island is literally 25 miles south of here. That's 25 miles of line that has to be rebuilt. Chris Burgess and Justin Locke run the Islands Energy Program for an American non-profit called the Rocky Mountain Institute. They have solar projects throughout Hurricane Alley. After Category 5 Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, they put microgrids on

the roofs of 10 schools. Maria also brushed St. Vincent. This is its first microgrid. Now the island's energy program has come to Marsh Harbor. So how big will this solar array be? 15 acres, right through here. That microgrid will satisfy 10% of Marsh Harbor's total power needs and will be built right between its government center and hospital,

both were without power for weeks after Dorian. This is high ground, which makes it less vulnerable to storm surge or other types of disaster events. So if a storm like Dorian hits again, the power to these two critical facilities stays on. Correct. The push to build storm-proof solar microgrids in the Bahamas began in 2017 after Hurricane Irma,

another Category 5 storm, tore through tiny Ragged Island at the southern tip of the island chain. After Ragged Island was devastated, I made a statement, let us show the world what can be done. We may be small, but we can set an example to the world. So it's your goal to make Ragged Island a green island? Absolutely. Absolutely. After which we can expand it. We can expand it.

To see the prime minister's green experiment, we flew to Ragged Island with Whitney Hasty, CEO of government-owned utility Bahamas Power and Light. Engineer Burlington Strawn met us there and took us to what he calls the very first hurricane-proof solar microgrid being installed in the Bahamas. Unlike other solar designs, it's very low to the ground. So this installation is rated to withstand 180 mile an hour winds. Which is an even harder punch than Irma landed back in 2017. There was significant devastation on this island. As you can see, some of the poles snapped right at the very base of the pole.

Snapped right at the base. Is that what happened all over the island? That happened throughout the island. This microgrid will produce enough electricity for Ragged Island's roughly 100 residents. The prime minister calls it a laboratory for the solar future. The past is a diesel generator needing boats to deliver fuel from hundreds of miles away, a system Whitney Hasty says is a nightmare.

In summer, we're almost on the verge of running out of fuel in some of these islands because bad weather sometimes prohibits the ships from actually getting to some of these locations. The Bahamian government spends nearly $400 million a year on imported fuel to keep its power plants running and passes that cost along to its citizens. They pay three to four times what we pay on the mainland U.S. for electricity here. Right, and that isn't price gouging. I mean, that's just inherent cost. Everything costs more in the islands.

The bill to install this new solar microgrid is $3 million. Hasty insists it's money well spent. So you have this initial big outlay to build these panels, but over time, the cost of generating power actually goes down. Absolutely. Absolutely. By using what God has blessed us with, which is the natural sun. It's not a perfect solution on Ragged Island.

Notably, the power from these panels will still feed into the vulnerable overhead power lines. The money's not there yet to bury them. One of the first things that I think everyone can agree on is everything has to go underground. Back in Hopetown, Matt Winslow says they have the funds to bury their lines. Americans with second homes here add a lot to the economy. Winslow's family foundation has donated nearly a million dollars to rebuilding efforts. They already have a makeshift microgrid powering the fire station

and health clinic, and Winslow has hired engineers to help plan a much bigger one on a nearby island. It's possible that over in Great Abaco we could put, you know, a solar array, 18 acres, and that goes, that power is piped through, you know, preferably a new undersea cable to the island. And that could be a main source of our power. That would be enough to power this island? Absolutely. The Bahamas' goal is to produce 30 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2030. Justin Locke and Chris Burgess of the Islands Energy Program

believe the country can do even better. The price of renewables have come down to the point where they're now very, very competitive with diesel, and in most cases, way cheaper than diesel. The key game changer has been battery storage. Battery storage has decreased in cost over 60% over the last five years. And what battery storage does is it enables the sun to shine when the sun is not shining. Renewables make more sense here than anywhere else in the world.

And in the Caribbean, microgrids are starting to show their value. When earthquakes struck Puerto Rico in 2020, the entire island's big electric grid was shut down for days. But remember those solar microgrids installed at schools? They kept providing power. The lessons can really apply anywhere. California has the same system architectures

here in the Caribbean, right? Fossil fuel, long transmission distribution lines, right? And you see that PG&E had to proactively shut off power to millions of people in order to prevent fire. If there had been these microgrids, might it have been that PG&E would not have had to cut off power to millions of consumers? Correct. Here in the Bahamas, there are still huge economic obstacles. Losses from Dorian equal nearly 30% of the country's entire annual GDP. You've got this incredible outlay to rebuild these islands

that were devastated by Dorian. Can you afford to bring on a new form of electrical generation? We cannot afford it. We recognize from day one that we cannot do it alone. Just weeks after Dorian hit, then Prime Minister Minnis spoke at the United Nations. He emphasized that most of the Bahamas was not damaged and eager for tourists, lifeblood of the economy. Then he said that First World countries and their pollution are at least partly to blame for the threat of ever-stronger hurricanes.

It is a threat which we cannot survive on our own. First World nations, and this is what I said at the UN, I said first world nations make the greatest contribution to climate change. They are the ones responsible for the changes that we see, the increase in velocity and ferocity of the hurricanes and the changes, typhoons that we see today. But we're the innocent victim. We're the ones that are being impacted by what you have created.

Minnis and leaders of other island nations have proposed that the U.S. and European countries contribute to an insurance fund. Think of it as a really rainy day fund to help rebuild from future storms. That's what you say and what you said at the UN the First World Nations should do. Absolutely. Are they doing it? It's an ongoing discussion. It's an ongoing discussion. Does this make the change to renewable energy that much more important,

imperative, urgent for you here in the Bahamas? It is, because even though our contribution to climate change is minimal, it's minuscule to compare with for a spoiled nation, but we still have a responsibility. Since this story first aired in 2020, that microgrid we saw being installed on Ragged Island is now operating and supplying all the electricity the island needs. They haven't had to ship diesel fuel to run that old generator in many months, which is especially welcome news given that the price of fuel has skyrocketed. The Bahamas has a new government and new prime minister who says he's just as committed to solar power as his predecessor.

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Did she pay full price or those suede sneakers or that luggage or that trench? Those jeans, that jacket, those heels. Is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering, start winning winners. Find fabulous for less.

Laurie Anderson is an artist whose work defies any easy description. She's a pioneer of the avant-garde, but as we learn, that doesn't begin to describe what she creates. Her work isn't sold in galleries. It's experienced by audiences who come to see her perform, singing, telling stories, and playing strange violins of her own invention. She won a Grammy for a chamber music album about Hurricane Sandy and remains one of America's most unusual and visionary artists. We met at her largest ever U.S. exhibition at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum earlier this year. Ladies and gentlemen, Laurie Anderson. She's played electronic drums on her body

and electric violins that sing and howl. For nearly five decades now, she's blended the beautiful and the bizarre, challenging audiences with homilies and humor. Welcome to Difficult Listening Hour. She blurs boundaries across music, theater, dance, and film. This is my dream body. It's not just audiences that have a hard time defining her work. Laurie Anderson sometimes does as well.

I used to say multimedia artist, and that was ridiculous. Multimedia artist is so clumsy. With a gun to my head, I say, I tell stories. And those look like paintings sometimes. They look like, you know, songs. They look like films. They're just stories. What is a story? What is its function? How does it work? Who's telling it? To who?

Oh, Superman. If you've heard of Laurie Anderson at all, it may be because of this eight-minute-long song she recorded back in 1980. It's eerie and somewhat unsettling, and to her surprise, it became a hit. This is a song about how, basically, technology cannot save you. I first heard it when I was 14. I was just like, what is this? And I still listen to it. It's about a lot of things. Justice, safety, power. There's always force.

She recorded Oh Superman herself in her apartment in downtown Manhattan. I had a lot of equipment that would loop things. So I was making a lot of vocal loops. Actually, you have to hit it right in the right spot.

So they hawk it and do this. This is the hand. You say, because when love is gone, there's always justice. Here, you just, here you go. You can use a vocoder. Here we go. Here we go. Go ahead.

And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always mom. Hi, mom. I love it. You do that very well. You got the job. The song led to her groundbreaking first album, Big Science. Pitchfork said listening to Laurie Anderson's first album

is like sitting down with a strange form of life that has been studying us for a long time. I'd like to meet that writer. I mean, everything is, when you actually break a town, bizarre and unlikely. That's my lens, I think. Unlikely. Lori Anderson grew up in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, where she was one of eight children. Every weekend, she played violin with the Chicago Youth Symphony and then walked across the street to the Art Institute to study painting.

And it didn't seem different to me to go like this or go like this. It was the same thing? Same thing. I would just, is that, or is that, is it... Playing the violin or painting? Colorful enough, is it? Cool enough, is it adventurous enough, is it right enough, is it, it's all, it's just the same exact thing, all the same questions. And it was just what a hand is doing and what is making sound over here, it's making color over here. She came to New York in 1966 and began experimenting with music and short films. But after a while, she thought her

work might be better received in Europe. You wanted to tour in Europe? I did, yeah. I wrote to about maybe 500, let's say, art centers, saying, planning a tour in the fall. I had no tour. And would you like to be part of that? With a couple responses, she took off for Italy. That's her in 1975, playing a violin with a tape recorder inside, playing loops so she could duet with herself. But then when is the concert over?

There's no end to a loop, so I thought I need a timing mechanism. So I wore some ice skates with their blades frozen into blocks of ice. So when at play, until the ice started melting and cracking, and then when I began to lose my balance, I would just stop. That was it. That was the clock. And you were doing this on the street? Yeah, usually in the hottest part of town, because it could take a long time to have these things, the cubes melt. For years, she was a traveling troubadour, experimenting with sound, light, and stories. After the unlikely success of O Superman, she got an eight-record deal with Warner Brothers.

Suddenly, the avant-garde artist was playing on MTV. That must have been strange to have that kind of commercial success dangled before you. I knew enough about the pop world to know it was extremely fickle. So I said, okay, I'm not going to be tricked by this. A chance meeting with a rock and roll legend she'd vaguely heard of changed her life. His name was Lou Reed, and he asked her out. And we went over to the AES convention at the Javits Center. Super geeky thing to do. We were looking at tube microphones.

So for your first date, you went to the Acoustical Society Engineering Convention. It doesn't sound very romantic. I didn't think of it as romantic. You didn't know it was a date? No, I did not. We said, let's go get a coffee. I said, okay. And I was like, I kind of like this guy.

We weren't really apart for 21 years after that. Wow. Yeah. He's my best friend. Sometimes you'd better hang on to your emotion. He's my best friend. They shared Buddhism, Tai Chi, and boundless creativity, and finally got married in 2008. Five years later, Lou Reed died after a long battle with liver cancer. You wrote about his death.

I've never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou's as he died. He wasn't afraid. I'd gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life, so beautiful, painful, and dazzling, does not get better than that. Yeah. Lou was a person who had thought about this and had prepared himself for it and was 100% there. Lori Anderson still lives in the apartment they shared in the West Village and every day walks her dog, Little Will, to the studio she's had since the 1970s. When we dropped in on her, she was rehearsing

with cellist Ruben Codelli. It's an opera she wrote about Amelia Earhart's doomed attempt to circumnavigate the globe. She's on this crackly radio and she's going like, I can see you, but I can't hear you. And they're going, I can hear you but I can't see you. She's in perpetual motion, playing with technology and images, fascinated by language and sound. What was really fun about this? She's working with an Australian university on an artificial intelligence program loaded with everything she's ever written, said or sung.

You can ask it a question or give it a photograph, and the algorithm creates an original poem in the words and speech pattern of Laurie Anderson. Half of it is really terrible poetry. A quarter of it is kind of interesting, and a quarter of it is really kind of great. To see how it works, we uploaded a photograph of my newborn son, Sebastian.

Wow. The mouth, the eye, the hand, the face. There's nowhere to go, no place to hide it. It's everywhere. Now that I'm here, I can't believe it's me. Who did this? Who are these people? Why are you here? I'm like crying. I find this really emotional. The thing is,

it really shows us more how much of ourselves we put into language. There's a story in an ancient play. Last year, Anderson delivered six virtual lectures as the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. You know, the best way to see the city is at night from the air. Following in the footsteps of Robert Frost, Leonard Bernstein, and Toni Morrison. Not surprisingly, Anderson's lectures were very different. That's it. Oh, you're in the conga room.

Perhaps the closest anyone can get inside Laurie Anderson's mind is this virtual reality world she created with a collaborator in Taiwan. It's a world that looks spatial, but it's made of words and drawings. Whoa! It feels as though you're flying inside a work of art. You've been working with technology for 40 years now. Does it still fascinate you? Yeah, it does. I'm still a geek. I like it.

I don't think I worship it. It's not the savior that some hope. No. And this was said to me by a cryptologist. If you think technology is going to solve your problems, you don't understand technology and you don't understand your problems. And I like that very much because, you know, people just go, oh yeah, that's going to fix it. Really? Laurie Anderson's largest ever U.S. exhibition is currently on display at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

It's an odyssey through her singular creative life. This seems very ominous to me. Good. There's so much flag-waving these days, and it becomes quite mechanical in some ways. And I guess I'm terrified of the rise of fascism around the world, frankly. Wow. In one room, she's painted words and images that seem to explode onto the walls and floor. It's a kind of multi-dimensional sketchbook of her thoughts, dreams, and stories.

Did you map this out before you did? No, I should have. New ideas are built on older works. of her thoughts, dreams, and stories. Did you map this out before you did it? No, I should have. New ideas are built on older works. She first came up with this concept in the 1970s. This is called Citizens. I've never seen anything like this. Miniature clay figures with video of people projected onto them.

And they all, I feel like, want to kill me. They're all sharpening knives. Because I think it's like, people like elves, right? You know? And fairies. So I think that, for me, is the fascination. These are some badass fairies. I mean...

From miniatures to monuments. We didn't see the sun. We didn't see the fresh air for weeks. In another room, another story. This one told by a giant video projection of Mohamed El-Gharani, held for seven years in Guantanamo as a teenager without charge until a judge released him. For me, I gave this person a megaphone to say, it's your turn. What do you have to say? This is not about my opinions of what happened here. This is Mohamed El-Gharani's story.

Laurie Anderson is 74 now and still conjuring up new stories and new ways to tell them. I'm not an artist to make the world a better place. This is not my goal, you know, at all. Except, like, secretly. Just very quietly, that's your goal? Quietly. Because I really love beautiful things because it's thrilling to to put your mind somewhere else and be somewhere

that you could never have imagined. And then suddenly you're imagining it and then you're there. It's magic. I'm Anderson Cooper. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.