LIVE from the NYPL: Antonio Damasio & Marina Abramovic

The New York Public Library

In his new book, Self Comes To Mind, Antonio Damasio, who directs the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and is the 2010 winner of the prestigious Honda Prize for scientific excellence, discusses how the brain uses emotion and feeling to create a sense of self in animals in humans, and how the elaborate version of the human self opened the way for creating the tools of culture. The admired neuroscientist, provocative lecturer and best-selling author will be in conversation with Marina Abramovic, the celebrated, spirited and controversial artist who, since the beginning of her career, has pioneered performance as a visual art form in a quest for emotional and spiritual transformation.

Marina has long tested the relationship between the audience and the ego of a performer. Her last exhibition/retrospective in New York, staged at the Museum of Modern Art, was “The Artist is Present," a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum’s atrium.

Marina's considers each public appearance an experiment and she never rehearses. This conversation with Antonio Damasio will be a revelation to the participants as well as the audience.