Who Are You Really?

In April 1981, at my request, my mother went to a detective agency. She hired them to follow me, to report my daily activities, and to provide photographic evidence of my existence. –Sophie Calle

What if you were to see yourself through the objective eyes of another – what might you learn that you never knew? Imagine this, go deep, consider how you might be seen by those who have never met you, just a stranger in public going about their day like every other human on earth. When we step back and consider this angle, we can begin to unpack the randomness of existence itself and our own life as just a speck floating in a sea of billions. While perhaps this idea can make us feel incredibly small, it can also be wonderfully humbling to realize that our struggles and triumphs are part of a vast network of humanity all walking through life on this little planet of ours.

Ellen Pearlman spoke to us in 2019 about a number of things, including her life as a global traveler and what was happening in her studio at the time. She was working on developing an emotionally intelligent, artificially intelligent brain-computer opera – a concept that was just a bit ahead of its time. She had already made the world’s first interactive brain opera, and this builds on that. In the original project, human participant wears a brainwave headset that interacts with a computer. In the new project, there was the addition of an emotionally intelligent computer. To learn more about Ellen’s work, and these projects in particular, listen to the complete interview.

Kristin Marting joined us in 2021 when we discussed her role as founding artistic director of HERE, an award-winning progressive arts center in lower Manhattan. At the time, we were emerging from the pandemic. Marting herself, a very people-oriented person as a theater maker, talked bout what a strange time it had been to be in her home so much, though she did take some valuable lessons from those complicated circumstances as we faced both the pandemic and a “racial reckoning” in the U.S. To learn more about Marting’s time during the pandemic, her work at HERE and more, listen to the complete interview.

Read the summary of this week's interviews and resources.