The Southampton Arts Center has announced a significant upgrade to its theater, including a new screen, surround sound system, state-of-the-art projector, and new seating, as well as a commitment to presenting critically acclaimed, independent films every Friday evening throughout the year. 

The center’s 2018 film programs will begin tomorrow evening at 6 with a free screening of “Growing Farmers,” Michael Halsband and Hilary Leff’s 17-minute documentary about the challenges and opportunities facing farmers on eastern Long Island. A panel discussion with Mr. Halsband, Dan Heston of the Peconic Land Trust, and Fred Lee, Greg Kessler, and Jennifer Halsey-Dupree, who are farmers, will follow the film. Meghan Harlow, editor of Edible East End, will moderate.

Future screenings will include “Dina,” a prizewinning documentary about the relationship between a man and woman on the autism spectrum (Friday, Feb. 23), “The Divine Order,” a comedy-drama from Switzerland about a fight for women’s suffrage in a small town in 1971 (March 2), and “Step,” a 2017 documentary about a girls high school dance team in Baltimore (March 9). Tickets to most programs are $10.

The center plans to continue its partnerships with the Hamptons International Film Festival, the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival, and the Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center.

Staring into the front picture window or tuning into the live feed on the website of Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, the current downstairs exhibition, “Off Season,” often looks like a tableau, static and formal, multiple mannequins posed just so to make an overall balanced composition.

Suddenly, one of the lifeless forms moves. It’s eerie and unnerving. Some people have even jumped, according to David Kennedy Cutler, the artist who has created this installation and is one of the dummies who actually moves throughout it.

He shares the space with four inert mannequins all dressed the same, with faces and hair that are generalized versions of the artist himself. When working as part of the installation, something he typically does over long weekends as he balances a job teaching at New York University, he dresses the same and dons a mask and wig that match the faces and hair he has given his clones. They all look “very close to my persona, but distilled in a way,” he said in the gallery recently.

So far, his winter residency has consisted of building a hermetic cube in the center of the gallery that surrounds a huge wide-format printer and a sleeping crate underneath it. He has since set about ripping apart much of the drywall around the cube to create “doors and windows,” freeing his dummies to move about the space and breathe life into their story. 

There’s myth, science fiction, Freud, and even a touch of Marx in this wide-ranging project that addresses humanity, survival, and the act of creation. Dressed like his dummies, he has given himself only one hole in the mask by one of his eyes, which makes breathing and seeing more difficult. The gloves he wears, made of fabric designed to look like mechanical hands, constrain him so that he is less dexterous, sometimes clumsy.

At the same time, he has assigned himself many tasks: making artworks related to survival (clothing, food, companionship), tending to the dummies and the damage they sustain over time, and the tears and rips to his own costume. These and other chores might seem basic, but they take on a Herculean character when he is so voluntarily compromised in his senses.

The evidence of his productivity is all around: his shelter, the sleeping crate he built for himself and the Plexiglas and wood versions for his dummies, the board he fashioned to walk with them about the gallery, his “fresco” shirts and other artworks he has in progress with potatoes and shoes as subject matter, the moving blanket painted and decorated with images of Dentyne Ice packages.

A camera monitors his activities for the live stream, which is on YouTube and the gallery’s home page. When he views himself in the four-hour playback loop, his labors “seem very programmatic. There’s no joy in it.” With the mask limiting his ability to express himself, “you can’t perceive how I’m feeling or emoting, but there is a sense that what I’m doing is not easy.”

Over the years, Mr. Cutler has worked as an art installer with many private and public clients on the South Fork, and has visited often. In this job, “you’re theoretically a working-class person, but you’re allowed access to this really rarified, privileged world of wealth. You’re an artist, but not supposed to commune with the object you’re installing. You have to wear gloves and clean socks, and smell okay. There is a barrier between you and the world in these scenarios,” he said. “Part of that is a performance. . . . I think about this a lot: What is the expectation of your role in society? Those things are pretty operative in the work.”

His work in the gallery touches on installation, performance, and formalism. Yet the dummies, which he has been using in work since 2014, were an outgrowth of his initial training and work as a sculptor. “The only job of a sculptor is to make something stand up. Here, the dummies never really can.”

He is also fascinated by the way digital culture has entered and changed almost everything in our lives, particularly how it affects our identity. He describes it as a “dual conundrum between social media and capitalism that you are expected to magnify your natural abilities or identity disproportionally . . . a constant need to project an idealized image of yourself.” Multiplicity is also part of this, “where you are not just defined by one head shot or an author photo on the back of a book, but a perpetual maintenance of identity, a projection of the self out into the world. . . . Experience is only valid via the document or image of it taking place.”

An outgrowth of that phenomenon is the manipulation of such images or documents so that no one can be sure what is real or manufactured. “I like to toy with that feeling of the uncanny . . . that rupture in perception, that thing that makes the commonplace strange,” he said.

Filming all of the residency on a digital camera, he may produce a post-exhibition film. After he leaves the gallery, he said he might take field trips with his posse to his clients’ houses, setting up more travails, maybe walking five across up a flight of stairs, or sitting down with them to watch television. For now, they can all still be seen in the Newtown Lane gallery, viewed through the picture window, or watched on live stream at halseymckay.com through March 24

Laurie Anderson, the musician and visual and performance artist who has defied convention across a more than four-decade career, has made language and storytelling a centerpiece of her varied explorations. In a world in which the president of the United States lies more than 2,000 times per year while denouncing the news media as fake, and a foreign adversary simultaneously seeds social media with misinformation, she and other artists have ample material to consider.

With “All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code,” Ms. Anderson, who has a house in Springs, offers a career retrospective showcasing her expansive and varied oeuvre. The book features voluminous essays and excerpts thereof, photographs depicting performances given in multiple contexts across her career, and illustrations, among them a series chronicling Lolabelle, her rat terrier who died in 2011, in the bardo, the transitional state of existence between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism. The latter was explored in her 2015 film “Heart of a Dog,” a meditation on love, loss, and death from a Buddhist perspective.

On Saturday at 2 p.m. at Guild Hall in East Hampton, Ms. Anderson will talk about “All the Things I Lost in the Flood” with Christina Strassfield, Guild Hall’s museum director and chief curator. A reception and book signing will follow. The talk is free, but reservations have been requested by visiting guildhall.org.

In her music, which may synthesize avant-garde, classical, pop, and more — “Landfall,” a collaboration with the genre-defying Kronos Quartet will be released tomorrow — Ms. Anderson regularly combines music and spoken-word meditations, her voice often electronically altered or distorted. A violinist, her instrument is also subject to manipulation, the result sometimes an entirely new or otherworldly sound. What is real, she seems to ask, in words, sounds, and images.

With her late husband, the musician Lou Reed, Ms. Anderson lived along the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan. Two days after Superstorm Sandy “turned our street into a dark, silky river,” she writes in “All the Things I Lost in the Flood,” she went to the basement to check on the materials and equipment stored there. “Nothing was left,” she writes. “The seawater had shredded and pulped everything. Even the electronic equipment was now a lumpy gray sludge. At first I was devastated. The next day I realized I would never have to clean the basement again.”

The day after that, she looked at a binder containing an inventory of all that had been lost. “I realized that since they were no longer objects, they had an entirely different meaning, and that having these long lists was just as good as having the real things. Maybe even better.”

Language, loss, stories, impermanence, and, since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., the rise of surveillance and data mining are woven throughout her work. In “Happiness,” an essay from 2001 excerpted in “All The Things I Lost in the Flood,” she writes that “every morning was like waking up in a parallel universe where it was suddenly possible that buildings and people could turn into dust before your eyes. . . . And when we look again we see the dreamlike impermanence of the world. The only words that make any sense to me now are the words of the Dalai Lama who said, ‘Your worst enemies are your best friends because they teach you things.’ ”

Ms. Anderson is “in hyper-drive now,” she said last Thursday, “maybe because of some reaction to the Trump era. I’m kind of thinking, ‘What else can we do but work, make things, try to make some beautiful things?’ ”

“I guess it was the last election,” she said, “that sent me over into the realm of what are stories, and what it’s like to live in a world of stories, especially when people are beginning to talk about how things end.” Such apocalyptic talk, she said, is manifested in discussions of catastrophic climate change, this month’s wild gyrations in the stock market and the uncertainty they represent, and the Doomsday Clock, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board, citing an “obvious and imminent” existential threat of nuclear war, recently set closer to midnight. 

“People are seeing things in a much darker way,” she said. “Not everything has this very neat structure. Also, this was a story that a lot of people did not expect. When expectations are suddenly broken, I think a lot of people feel quite lost, it’s a ‘story emergency.’ ”

She started working on the book, she said, “with this idea of what happens when the world kind of disappears, and records are an example: Records disappeared, then record stores. Books, and then book stores. It’s a world of representation. That is the jumping-off place for the talk about the book.”

“It really is fun to do yet another layer of this — doing the book about the work, and the work about the book,” she said. “I like to build on things — it’s all, in a way, one long piece. I’m already seeing how it was working, understanding better what I was trying to get at.”

Ms. Anderson was recently in Europe, where she began performing in the early 1970s, part of a wave of American artists who found, like jazz musicians before them, greater opportunities and larger, more responsive audiences there. Today’s political climate, she said, encourages projects beyond our shores. 

“I was an expat,” she said. “I got more opportunities to work in Europe than I did in the United States. . . . People were asking me constantly, ‘How can you live in a place like that?’ It was not a short answer. That’s why I wrote ‘United States,’ ” a five-record set recorded in 1983 that spanned eight hours in its live performances. “A very long piece, because it’s a complicated thing, obviously,” she said. “I feel that there’s many similar things going on now.”

And not just here: A “giant fracturing” is happening in Europe as well, she said. “This carefully constructed version of your personality, the world, and suddenly you’re not so sure. . . . It’s a very intensely interesting moment now. When you no longer have the timeworn narratives you’ve been living by, that makes it a really interesting place, and you really have to live in the present, which most people aren’t doing, particularly.”

Saturday’s discussion follows one in Boston on Feb. 7. Another happens at Town Hall in Manhattan tomorrow. “It’s fun to talk about something you don’t know so well yet,” she said. “You don’t have your rap down, exactly. Before it freezes into one thing, I’m enjoying what people think about it.”

Along with Saturday’s talk, Ms. Anderson will offer a brief presentation at a screening of “American Psycho” on Sunday at 5 p.m. at the Southampton Arts Center. “I was one of the filmmakers asked to choose a film w­­ith ‘American values’ as part of the campaign to rebuild Sag Harbor Cinema,” she said. “I can’t stand violence, but look forward to seeing this film through a socio-political filter. This may not be completely fair to the film or to the filmmaker, but nevertheless it’s one way to see movies.”

Ms. Anderson’s “Chalkroom,” a collaboration with the new-media artist Hsin-Chien Huang that she describes in “All the Things I Lost in the Flood” as a virtual-reality work in which the reader flies through an enormous structure made of words, drawings, and stories, will be on view at Guild Hall from June 2 to July 22. She plans a reading of her book in July, which she hinted would experiment with putting it into a musical context. 

“I left a lot out,” she said. “I wanted to focus on how words are affecting imagery. I didn’t really talk about music, and in many ways that’s my thing, being a musician.”

The Met: Live in HD will present a simulcast of Franco Zeffirelli’s classic production of Puccini’s “La Boheme” on Saturday at 12:30 p.m. at Guild Hall. Alicia Longwell, the chief curator of the Parrish Art Museum, will introduce the program.

The story of love among young artists in Paris in the 1830s is widely considered the world’s most popular opera. The production stars Sonya Yoncheva as the fragile Mimi, Michael Fabiano as the impoverished poet Rodolfo, and Lucas Meachem as the artist Marcello. Marco Armiliato conducts. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.

The Met: Live in HD will present a simulcast of Bartlett Sher’s new production of Donizetti’s comic opera “L’Elisir d’Amore” on Saturday at noon at Guild Hall. One of the most consistently popular operatic comedies since its premiere in Milan in 1832, the story centers on Nemorino, played by Matthew Polenzani, who is in love with Adina (Pretty Yende), who torments him with her indifference. Nemorino hopes a traveling quack’s love potion — the elixir of love — will answer his prayers.

James R. Oestreich of The New York Times praised the lead performers, citing Ms. Yende’s “winning combination of elegance and spunk” and the “pliant strength and clarion tone” of Mr. Polenzani’s singing. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.

The Hamptons International Film Festival’s Now Showing series will screen “Novitiate,” a drama directed by Maggie Betts, on Saturday at 6 p.m. Set in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Tennessee, the story is about Cathleen, a young girl whose devotion to God leads her to enter a Catholic convent at 17. 

The harsh realities of being a servant of God lead to her struggle with issues of faith, sexuality, and the changes in the church wrought by the dawn of Vatican II. Tickets are $15, $12 for HIFF and Guild Hall members.

To celebrate what would have been George Harrison’s 75th birthday, Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will have two Beatles tribute nights tomorrow and Saturday at 8. For its fifth annual Beatles weekend, Bay Street will feature Harrison’s most memorable Fab Four-era tunes as well as highlights from his 1971 solo album, “All Things Must Pass,” and other songs from his post-Beatles career.

The band will include Dave Giacone, Fred Gilde, Mick Hargreaves, Dan Koontz, Jeff Levitt, and Howard Silverman. Joe Lauro is the program’s producer, Michael Schiano its musical director. Tickets are $25 in advance, $35 the day of the show.

“A Musical Valentine,” a selection of love songs from the Great American Songbook performed by Karen Jolicoeur and Lars Woodul, will be presented on Sunday afternoon at 2:30 at the Montauk Library. William Lewis will accompany the vocalists on piano.

The free concert will feature the music of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, and Richard Rodgers, among others, and such familiar favorites as “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” “Embraceable You,” and “My Funny Valentine.” 

Ellen Johansen and Marlene Markard will give a free four-hand piano concert on Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton. The East End pianists will perform a program of works written for piano duos, including Camille Saint-Saens’s “The Carnival of the Animals,” a Francis Poulenc sonata, and John Corigliano’s “Gazebo Dances.” 

Both conservatory-trained pianists, Ms. Johansen and Ms. Markard perform as soloists and collaborative pianists throughout Long Island and the New York metropolitan area. A reception will follow the concert.

Rob Marshall and John DeLuca will screen and discuss their film adaptation of the Broadway musical “Chicago” on Sunday in the Senior Lecture Hall at the Ross School in East Hampton as part of the Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center’s American Values film series.

The film was as successful as the theatrical production, winning an Academy Award for best picture of 2002 along with five other Oscars. A comedy musical, the story addresses themes of celebrity, scandal, and corruption in Jazz Age Chicago. Mr. Marshall, a veteran of the theater, directed and choreographed the film. The free screening and talk will begin at 2 p.m.

Valentine From Janet Lehr

“Valentine and Art: Together Forever,” a group exhibition, will open at Janet Lehr Fine Arts in East Hampton with a reception Saturday from 8 to 11 p.m. and continue through March 7. The gallery has suggested that revelers wear “a touch of red” to the opening.

The exhibition will include several unique Bert Stern photographs of Marilyn Monroe and paintings and sculpture by the contemporary artists David Demers, Adam Handler, Ron Agam, Haim Mizrahi, Colin Christian, Christopher Deeton, and Shimon Okshteyn. Flower studies by Warren Brandt and Paul Georges and figure studies by Balcomb Greene and Paul Resika will also be on view.

Virva Hinnemo in SoHo

“Four Feet,” a solo exhibition of paintings by Virva Hinnemo, will open Wednesday at the Anita Rogers Gallery in SoHo with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will remain on view through April 21.

Ms. Hinnemo’s new paintings reflect a shift from cardboard as her primary surface to canvas and works on paper, but she continues to apply broad swaths of paint that, while not thickly applied, have a straightforward, material presence.

According to a press release, “Her language is spare and unaffected. . . . The virtues of paint are abundant but frugal, open-ended yet tough-minded. . . . [her] blunt inscriptions are made exclusively by hand and give the impression of signs or symbols observed directly from life and always on her own terms.” Ms. Hinnemo, who was born in Finland, earned a B.F.A. from the Parsons School of Design and has lived in Springs since 2012.

Four Photographers

“Winter to Spring,” a show of work by four photographers, is on view at the Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor through April 10. Stephen Wilkes’s “Day to Night” series captures sites throughout the world, among them the crowded beaches of Coney Island and Santa Monica, Calif. Daniel Jones’s photographs from the “Seaside Expressions” series take a painterly approach to the medium. 

Blair Seagram’s images of surfers are inspired in part by “their keen sense of timing catching a wave then riding across it.” Roberto Dutesco is best known for his photographs of wild horses on Sable Island off the coast of Nova Scotia.

Southampton Art Show

The Southampton Artists Association will hold its winter art show at the Southampton Cultural Center from Wednesday through March 4. Receptions will be held Feb. 24 and March 3, both days from 4 to 6 p.m. The exhibition will include oils, acrylics, watercolors, pastels, mixed media, sculpture, and photographs.­