Amanda Palmer + David Eagleman

Every moment counts when you’re performing as an artist.

When Amanda Palmer was first starting out in music, her day job was as a street artist. During hours spent standing on a crate as The Eight Foot Bride she offered flowers and eye contact to those who dropped money at her feet. From moments on the street to moments onstage and offstage, from nights couch surfing to crowd surfing, Palmer has continually sought time for these intimate interactions between herself and her fans. Together with Brainwave fellow and neuroscientist David Eagleman, Palmer will explore time and how it relates to these integral interactions, in a life that balances somewhere between musician, performance artist, community builder, and now mother.

Brainwave is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

About the Speakers

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and the New York Times bestselling author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain and Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. He is the writer and host of the Emmy-nominated PBS television series The Brain. Eagleman is an adjunct professor at Stanford University, a Guggenheim fellow, and the director of the Center for Science and Law. He has written for The New York Times, Discover Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, Wired, and many others, and he appears regularly on National Public Radio and BBC.

 

Amanda Palmer is a singer, songwriter, playwright, pianist, filmmaker, and blogger who simultaneously embraces and explodes traditional frameworks of music, theatre, and art. She first came to prominence as one half of the Boston-based punk cabaret duo the Dresden Dolls, earning global applause for their wide-ranging theatricality and inventive songcraft. Her solo career has proven equally brave and boundless, including such groundbreaking works as the fan-funded Theatre Is Evil, which made a top 10 debut on the SoundScan/Billboard 200 upon its 2012 release and remains the top-funded original music project on Kickstarter. In 2013 she presented “The Art of Asking” at the annual TED conference, which has since been viewed over 10 million times worldwide. The following year saw Palmer expand her philosophy into the New York Times bestseller The Art of Asking: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Let People Help. Since 2015, Palmer has used Patreon, a patronage subscription crowdfunding platform, to fund the creation of her art work while enabling her to collaborate with artists all over the world, with over 11,000 patrons supporting her creations each month.