Performance artist, musician, electronics geek, poet, stand-up comedian, perpetual autodidact, multitasker extraordinaire — so many words to explain Laurie Anderson, and yet they don’t quite get to the point.

Neither, really, do her creations for which she’s best known: massive multimedia spectacles such as 1995’s “The Nerve Bible” (which required touring with tons of audiovisual equipment) or albums of new songs and electronic tone poems (the last was 2001’s “Life on a String”), or pared-down solo shows like the one she’s currently touring, “The End of the Moon.”

If there’s an overarching theme to her sprawling output, Anderson isn’t quick to volunteer it. After all, at 57, she is an avant-pop artist and philosopher who enjoys asking questions rather than giving answers.

“The End of the Moon” is a skittering collection of thoughts and instrumental songs around a central concept: Her recent stint as the first and only artist-in-residence at NASA. But the show is anchored in more earthly observations, including those gleaned from long walks taken in Europe (for an audio journal that’s still a work in progress), and a question someone asked her that took her by surprise: “Who taught you what beauty is?”

Anderson brings “The End of the Moon” to the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Thursday.

What she won’t bring for the show, though, is telling: Gone are the huge electronics and theatrics that are her stock-in-trade. For “The End of the Moon,” Anderson is accompanied by nothing more than a lectern with a small synthesizer, some candles, a comfortable chair and her violin. (One lower-tech device: A video projection of a moon and her face on the wall behind her.) It’s all part of Anderson’s continuing kick toward paring down.

“It’s amazing how small things can shrink,” she says. “I’m running this show off my laptop. It’s really fun to take things that used to require giant semis and put them in my pocket.”

Get Out spoke to Anderson about her show and her work, and tried to get a deeper sense of why she does what she does.

Q: What’s prompted you to move away from larger, more technological shows?

A: To me, it’s a more flexible way to work. And especially since (“The End of the Moon”) involves a lot of language, it seemed like just way too much. As the language gets more involved, the other stuff starts falling away. Plus I got to the point where I couldn’t stand to do another multimedia show. It just seemed like every car company, every fashion company, can’t release anything without having big screens. I just thought, eh, stop with this stuff. It’s too much. Plus, I think people are a little bored with that. I know I am.

Q: Explain the concept of the show.

A: “End of the Moon” is, on the surface, a kind of report of my NASA artist-in-residency. But it veers all over the place. That’s kind of a hook, really. I do talk a lot about what I did, and that’s the journalistic part of it, really trying to describe it and understand it — which, for me, has been very difficult. It’s really hard to write about things in a way that describes them well, in a true journalistic style, the way it was, not how you thought it was. NASA is such a big, sprawling organization, it was really daunting to try to be the artist in residence. Since they never had one before, I really had to make it up, and that was wild.

Q: Did you spend the time absorbing?

A: Yes, I did. I didn’t want to do a tech art project just for the same reason I didn’t want to do a multimedia show at the moment. You know: “NASA artist lights up dark side of the moon with mirrors bounced from satellite.” (Laughs.) That would be great, but they were already doing giant art projects. They don’t need me to do that. I said, “What do they need me for?” I’m just looking at what they’re looking for, and in a lot of ways it was very similar in the end to what I’m looking for as an artist — many of the frustrations as well — in the sense that, it’s hard to define what you’re looking for. The simplest of examples is, Einstein discarded some of his theories. Why? Because he said they weren’t beautiful.

Q: They didn’t fit his aesthetic.

A: Yeah. So you’re thinking, What is he looking for, then? Where are we? Wait a second! It made me think, Why do I call this art and that not? In our own culture, it’s very stylized in the first place. One thing is a work of art and another is a refrigerator. This whole project started with another question, something someone asked me: “Who taught you what beauty is?” I said, Whoa! What a question!

Q: And the walks in Europe. It seems like you’ve got your feet on the ground and your head in the stars.

A: The walking was really trying to get away from equipment. Go out the door, try something else. And again, it’s sort of the same thing, not knowing what you’re looking for. You have to start with some sort of theory or some sort of goal and be willing to throw it away when you see it in another way, opening up. That’s been the best way I work as an artist, trying to be as intuitive as possible but also willing to junk everything quickly.

Q: And you also deal more in the abstract, especially in a show like this.

A: Well, (“The End of the Moon”) is a mixture of these stories, that reporting, and the other is language: I really am just trying to catch it before it becomes fixed. I’m trying to catch the stuff before you’ve figured it out and plugged it in and evaluated it, so it’s really almost as instinctual as I can be.

Q: Talk to me about your music. There are some songs I keep on the iPod simply because they’re poppy — “Babydoll,” “The Island Where I Come From.” You had a hint of early pop success with “O Superman” (1981). What’s kept you from going the Peter Gabriel route of taking experimental music and aiming more popward?

A: I guess a lack of ambition in that respect. (Laughs.) Although I am getting interested in making another melodic thing. I think I get very abstract for a while and then . . . I do love songs, so I think I’ll go back to that. It always seems like I’m doing that, starting from nothing. I love that feeling.