City Lights in conjunction with Cultural Services of the Consul General of France in San Francisco, Editions La Volte, and Villa Albertine San Francisco present

Alain Damasio in conversation with Jaron Lanier

Award Winning French author and educator Alain Damasio visits the Bay Area on a cultural reconnaissance mission exploring the many seismic realities that inform the San Francisco peninsula. Join two great thinkers, writers, and cultural movers in an evening of discussion traversing literature, politics, technology, and the creative process.

Alain Damasio is a celebrated French writer of sci-fi and fantasy and the founder of L’ Ecole des Vivants (a school of experimental art practice.) He also works as a scriptwriter for comics, radio fictions, movie and TV series. He is notable as an audio and spoken word artist. His works have focused heavily on futuristic politics and incorporate significant science fiction and fantasy elements. He is the author of the French bestsellers The Outer Zone, The WindWalkers, and The Stealthies. Damasio’s book have the distinctive feature of being not just books but books and objects. He include dvd’s and soundtrack intended to accompany his texts. He is the winner of numerous honors for his work. These include the Chevallier of the Order of Arts and Lettres, Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire Prize, and the European Utopiales Prize, amongst others.

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music. He is considered the founder of the field of virtual reality. In 2005, Foreign Policy named Lanier as one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals. In 2010, Lanier was named to the TIME 100 list of most influential people. In 2014, Prospect named Lanier one of the top 50 World Thinkers and in 2018, Wired named Lanier one of the top 25 most influential people over the last 25 years of technological history. He has composed contemporary classical music and is a collector of rare instruments (of which he owns one to two thousand; his acoustic album, Instruments of Change features Asian wind and string instruments such as the khene mouth organ, the suling flute, and the sitar-like esraj. Together with Mario Grigorov, Lanier compose the soundtrack to the documentary film The Third Wave (2007). Jaron Lanier’s published works include You Are Not a Gadget (2010), Who Owns the Future? (2013), Dawn of the New Everything (2017), and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018.) He makes his home in the San Francisco Bay Area.