Live webcast on the HASTAC website:
Conversation with artist *Laurie Anderson* and neuroscientist *Antonio
Damasio*,
moderated by Professor Anne Balsamo, following a lecture by Anderson
(see below; please note that *only* the conversation will be simulcast.)
Saturday, October 21st, 8 p.m. (PDT) at USC's Norris Theater and simulcast
FREE
at www.hastac.org (Register to view webcast.)

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Laurie Anderson: Recent Works
Saturday, October 21st
University of Southern California's Norris Theater
7 p.m. (PDT)
Free and open to the public!

Laurie Anderson will present a special audio-visual lecture exploring the
intersections of art, science and creativity. One of the permier
perfromance artists in the world, Ms. Anderson has consistently intrigued,
entertained and challenged audiences with her multimedia persentations.
Anderson's artistic career has cast her in roles as various as visual
artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, ventriloquist,
electronics whiz, vocalist and instrumentalist. Following her
presentation, Ms. Anderson will be joined in conversation by
neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, director of the USC Brain and Creativity
Institute and a leading researcher of cognition, emotions, and neural
systems.

This special presentation is part of the HASTAC In|Formation Year, devoted
to twelve months of public programming from a number of universities meant
to promote the human and humane dimenstions of technology and to encourage
conversation and exchange between humanists, artists, technologists, and
scientists (www.hastac.org).

Recognized worldwide as a leader in the groundbreaking use of technology
in the arts, Ms. Anderson has collaborated with Interval Research
Corporation, a research and development laboratory founded by Paul Allen
and David Liddle, in the exploration of new creative tools, including the
Talking Stick. Anderson has produced numerous albums and touring shows
and has worked with artists and performers as diverse as William
Burroughs, Arto Lindsay, Andy Kaufman, Ian Ritchie, Peter Gabriel, Perry
Hoberman, David Sylvian, Jean Michel Jarre, Brian Eno, Nona Hendryx, Bobby
McFerrin, Dave Stewart, Hector Zazou, and Lou Reed. She wrote the entry
about New York for Encyclopedia Britannica, hosted the PBS special Art 21,
and received the 2001 Tenco Prize for Songwriting in San Remo, Italy and
the 2001 Deutsche Schallplatten Prize for Life on a String. Currently,
Ms. Anderson is touring a new solo work begun during her tenure as the
first artist-in-residence of NASA in 2003-2004. Other recent projects
included a new commission for the World Expo 2005 in Japan and benefit
performances on behalf of Hurricane Katrina victims.

Professor Damasio is a leading neuroscientist. His research interests are
directed at the neural basis of cognition and behavior at large-scale
systems level. The work is based on MR lesion method, PET/fMRI, and
histological mapping of neuropathological tissue. Major contributions
include:
(1) the elucidation of cortical and subcortical contributions to face and
object recognition;
(2) the identification of specific neural sites involved in emotion
processing;
(3) the demonstration that emotion is covertly implicated in
decision-making; and
(4) the identification of limbic and brainstem sites of pathology in
Alzheimer's disease.

Until earlier 2005, Antonio Damasio was at the University of Iowa as Van
Allen Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology.
Damasio's books, Descartes' Error (1994), The Feeling of What Happens
(1999), and Looking for Spinoza (2003), are translated in numerous
languages and taught in universities worldwide. He is also the recipient
of numerous awards (including, most recently, the 2005 Asturias Prize in
Science and Technology; and the 2004 Signoret Prize, which he shared with
his wife, Hanna Damasio). Damasio is a member of the Institute of
Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and the
European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He has been named "Highly Cited
Researcher" by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Professor Anne Balsamo is the Director of the Institute for Multimedia
Literacy at the University of Southern California. She previously served
as the Associate Director of the Stanford Humanities Lab and is a founding
partner of Onomy Labs, a Silicon Valley-based technology design firm. She
has faculty affiliations with Stanford University's Center for Design
Research and its Feminist Studies Program. Until 2001, she was a
principal scientist and a member of RED (Research on Experimental
Documents) at Xerox PARC, where she did collaborative research on
experimental documents and new media genres. She served as project
manager and new media designer for the development of RED's touring museum
exhibit, "XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading." Her first book,
Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke, 1996)
investigated the social and cultural implications of emergent
bio-technologies. She is currently working on a new book entitled
Designing Culture: A Work of the Technological Imagination, which examines
the relationship between cultural theory and the design of new media. She
is a founding member of HASTAC.

This event is made possible by the USC School of Cinema-Television, the
Institute for Multimedia Literacy, the USC Arts and Humanities Initiative,
MOCA, and the Annenberg Center for Communication, among others. For more
information, see http://www-cntv.usc.edu/resources/events/events.cfm