Marina Abramović, Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze

In 2012, the internationally renowned artist Marina Abramović embarked on a performance and experiment with the exhibition and research center Laboratoria Art & Science in Moscow. Calling on the center’s founding director and curator Daria Parkhomenko as her performance partner, she restaged her 2011 piece Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze as a special program featured in the symposium Brainstorm: The Artist in the Context of Neuroscience. According to Laboratoria, the artist and curator approached the performance as a scientific experiment—hoping to prove an artistic hypothesis of synchronized brain activity in non-verbal communication. To record their findings, Abramović and Parkhomenko teamed up with Alexander Kaplan and Arina Kochetova at the Laboratory for Neurophysiology and Neuro-Computer Interfaces at Moscow State University. 

Marina Abramovic, Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze (2012). Photography: Alan Vouba.

The experiment is an extension of her 2010 performance The Artist is Present—staged at MoMA to great acclaim. Inherent to each of these projects is a fascination with collective consciousness, a theme that Abramović explores both through social extroversion and meditative introspection. Dressed in matching laboratory coats and black pants, the curator and artist sat patiently as Kaplan and Kochetova affixed a cap of yellow and white sensors to their skull—wires coming down like a robotic mane of hair. They proceeded to complete different thirty-minute configurations of relation: first making direct eye contact, then looking at themselves in a mirror, followed by indirect eye contact through the mirror. Abramović made every effort to clear her mind, just focusing on her breathing until she experienced a tunnel of energy emanating from Parkhomenko’s eyes—observing fluctuations in emotion and concentration.

Marina Abramovic, Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze (2012). Photography: Alan Vouba.
Marina Abramovic, Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze (2012). Photography: Alan Vouba.

Marina Abramovic, Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze (2012), Laboratoria Art & Science, Moscow.

The Dive is a recurring series that spotlights artists and scientists who activate their practice to delve into the unified field of consciousness—experiments at the intersection of expression and neuroscience.