Laurie Anderson

“In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space,” wrote Herman Melville in Moby-Dick. In this roundtable discussion, iconoclastic performance artist Laurie Anderson reflects on space-time with Met curator Melanie Holcomb, time-bending novelist Rebecca Stead, and astrophysicist-cum-art historian SeungJung Kim. From her multimedia adaptation of Melville’s sprawling epic to her recent Hurricane Sandy-inspired collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, “Landfall,” Anderson reconciles the existential enormity of geologic time with the the revelation that only one thing is timeless: “Art is long, life is short,” or to quote her late husband, “Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.”

Wed., April 30, 6 p.m., 2014