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.
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), 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.