Alain Damasio in Conversation with Jaron Lanier

During his Villa Albertine residency in the Bay Area, Alain Damasio is exploring the many seismic realities that inform the San Francisco Peninsula. On April 26, join Damasio and computer scientist and visual artist Jaron Lanier for an evening of discussion traversing literature, politics, technology, and the creative process. 

Alain Damasio is a renowned French science fiction and fantasy writer and the founder of L’École des Vivants, a school of experimental art practice. He also works as a scriptwriter for comics, radio fictions, movies, and TV series. He is a noted audio and spoken word artist. His works have focused heavily on futuristic politics and incorporate significant science fiction and fantasy elements. He is the author of French bestsellers The Outer Zone, The WindWalkers, and The Stealthies. Damasio’s books have the distinctive feature of being not just books but objects as well; he often includes DVDs and soundtracks intended to accompany his texts He has won numerous honors for his work, including Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and the European Utopiales Prize. 

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music. He is considered the founder of the field of virtual reality. In 2005, Foreign Policy named Lanier as one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals. In 2010, Lanier was named to the TIME 100 list of most influential people. In 2014, Prospect named Lanier one of the top 50 World Thiners, and in 2018, Wired named Lanier one of the top 25 most influential people over the last 25 years of technological history. He has composed contemporary classical music and is a collector of rare instruments, of which he owns between one and two thousand; his acoustic album, Instruments of Change, features Asian wind and string instruments such as the khene mouth organ, the suling flute, and the sitar-like esraj. With Mario Grigorov, Lanier composed the soundtrack to the documentary film The Third Wave (2007). His published works include You Are Not a Gadget (2010), Who Owns the Future? (2013), Dawn of the New Everything (2017), and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018). He currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.