Mack Lecture Series
April 8–29, 7 pm$15 ($12 Walker members, students, and seniors)Walker Cinema
Hear directly from explorers of our culture and contemporary moment during the Mack Lecture Series. Throughout the month of April, artists, writers, and other great thinkers at the forefront of diverse fields share their vision on topics ranging from artificial intelligence in performance art to gender politics and gonzo journalism.
Annie Dorsen and Catherine Havasi with Simon Adler
April 8, 7 pm
Writer-director Annie Dorsen tries “to make perceptible how ideas change over time: where they come from, how they influence and are influenced by politics and culture, and how they take root in the body, physically and emotionally.” For this conversation, she explores the intersection of algorithms and live performance with artificial intelligence researcher and computational linguist Catherine Havasi, moderated by Simon Adler, a producer for WNYC’s Radiolab.
Annie Dorsen’s performance work Yesterday Tomorrow, takes place in the Walker’s McGuire Theater March 27–28.
JD Samson
April 15, 7 pm
Genderqueer political activist, visual artist, and musician JD Samson is perhaps best known as leader of the band MEN and one-third of the electronic-feminist-punk band Le Tigre. As a self-defined “gender outlaw,” she will investigate the precarious masculinity of the butch/masculine-of-center body, play with traditional concepts of ownership and destruction, and break down the charged heteronormative history of queer sex dynamics.
Charles Ray
April 22, 7 pm
Making the commonplace strange is central to the work of Los Angeles–based artist Charles Ray. Redefining the boundaries of sculpture since the 1980s, his subversive and painstaking style has shifted over the past 20 years to a figurative approach paired with highly technical strategies of fabrication. In this lecture, Ray weaves together sculptural art, its creation, and its meaning in civic space and time.
Jon Ronson
April 29, 7 pm
Jon Ronson has spent (a lot of) time with serial killers, conspiracy theorists, and porn stars. Fascinated by madness, strange behavior and the human mind, Jon has spent his life exploring mysterious events and meeting extraordinary people. He is regular contributor to BBC and the popular NPR program This American Life, he is also the author of eight books, including The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Psychopath Test, and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. His TED talk on the Psychopath Test has been viewed over 22 million times. In July 2017, Jon released an Audible Original audio series called The Butterfly Effect, which went straight to number one on the US audio charts and TIME named his most recent podcast, the Last Days of August, one of the Best of 2019.
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