Karma: Laurie Anderson + Gavin Schmidt

Climatologist Gavin Schmidt has found himself on a list of 17 international “climate criminals” being passed around on the floor of the Senate. Artist Laurie Anderson asks him what it might take for our leaders to accept their collective responsibility for the climate.

About the Speakers

Laurie Anderson is acknowledged as one of today’s premier performance artists. Known primarily for her multimedia presentations, she has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist. Major works include United States I-V (1983), Empty Places (1990), The Nerve Bible (1995), and Songs and Stories for Moby Dick. Anderson’s visual work has been featured in The Missing Peace here at the Rubin Museum of Art and she has made many appearances here, most recently when she narrated Tenzin Choegyal and Jesse Paris Smith’s Bardo Songs for In-between. Her new film, Heart of a Dog is currently running at the Film Forum.

Gavin Schmidt is a New York-based climate scientist working on simulations of past, present, and future climate. Schmidt is the co-author, with Joshua Wolfe, of Climate Change: Picturing the Science (2009) and has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed journal articles. He was a contributing author for the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. and was a founding member and contributor to RealClimate, a climate science blog for journalists and the public.He is the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a senior researcher at the Columbia University Earth Institute.