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End of the West CollectiveWhat if myth were not a lie, but a story truer than truth?This preview screening and conversation with artists takes us backstage into the creative process of devising a new intimate dramatic work.The story features an encounter with Janus, the two-faced and powerful yet limited deity of doorways. Destiny brings this god and a human together in a cave-like workshop, though they remain obscured from each other’s sight by a mortal veil. Making an opening for them to truly see each other will require a magic outside of either of their powers of creation.This single story is told through different cultural expressions and developed through three different personal lenses, individual histories, and arts practices. Bharatanatyam, Indigenous art, modern theatre, and spectator participation coalesce to become creatively reborn in a theatrical womb-like cave – a specially designed theatre for one. Puppets, masked dancers, film, sound, shadow and light heighten the intimacy of...

A short video, “Layering Community on the Wynantskill,” introduces a project initiated by the question “How Will We Live Together?” Actions and workshops over the last months have explored local layers of geology, geography, and history of both structures and people, with engagement from the community at several levels. Photographers, painters, musicians, interviewers have interacted with neighbors who responded to community press announcements. A first workshop followed the Wynantskill creek from its rise in Glass Lake, using a jigsaw puzzle of Joseph Hidley’s 1866 painting and historic maps, to where it joins the Hudson River in Troy. Team members showed video footage of kayaking the upper levels of the stream, and results of a train marking exploration. A second workshop focused on historic images of local buildings to identify what has survived. In preparation for the third workshop, team members interviewed surviving mill workers, providing names to search for in the Sand Lake Union Cemetery....

“Eureka! - I found it!” This famous exclamation of Archimedes as he discovered the law of buoyancy in a bathtub captures the joy of embodied knowledge and heuristic experience. How can dramatic arts infuse architectural pedagogy with Eureka potential, while fostering creative collaboration and ethical imagination? This dialogue among architectural educators reflects on recent theatrical experiments and dramatic approaches to design education. Heuristic Pedagogy is part of the Theatres of ArchImagination contribution to SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible, as part of the Arts Letters & Numbers exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

It is becoming increasingly clear that technological fixes and short-term policies are insufficient to redirect humanity’s unsustainable trajectory. Education has been identified as a key enabler in achieving the United Nations Global Goals and averting the worst effects of climate change. According to UNESCO (2018), Education focused on Sustainable Development (ESD) “encourages changes in knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to enable a more sustainable and just society for all” by empowering and equipping “current and future generations to meet their needs using a balanced and integrated approach to the economic, social and environmental dimensions.” ESD is about more than revising school curriculum—it’s about rethinking how we learn, where we learn, and who we consider to be “students” and “teachers”.  We all have something to learn, and we all have something to teach. To get out of our current predicament, it’s going to take all of us working together, across traditional borders of subjects, sectors, and...

How does drawing construct perspectives of thought? What happens between thinking and image making? In this lecture, the artist Ian Woo asks himself what are the reasons for his desire to construct pictures of spaces that evolve and transit as an image of continuous presence. The notion of space in Woo’s deliberations offer visual ques to questions and thoughts about what is solid and empty, sensations that relate to visual qualities and fissures of the material and atomic world. In Woo’s experience, this is akin to looking at a portrait sketch of a drawing by Ingres, while motivated by the way components of the subject matter’s skin, membrane and clothes shift between an optical axis varying from soft to hard matter in relation to the blurred and focused. For Woo, the state and presence of an image is always elusive, where outline of shapes can be activated things or spaces depending on where your eyes...

Ramiro Gomez was born in 1986 in San Bernardino, California, to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents—his father a trucker, his mother a janitor at his own school—and displayed artistic talents early on which presently won him admission to CalArts. But he left that institute within a year and instead secured employment as a nanny for an entertainment industry family in the Hollywood Hills (“a part of town,” as he says, “which is largely Latino by day but which, come five in the evening, when the trucks descend and the limos return, reverts to its largely Anglo basis”). Still, his artistic proclivities were hardly dimmed. He began by taking back-issues of architecture, fashion, and design magazines out of the recycling bin, squirreling them back to his room, and subtly doctoring the glossy high-life ads and features by painting in images of the low-income nannies, housecleaners, gardeners, and others who made such life possible. He went on to...

“Nothing is too beautiful to be true “ (in the paraphrase of Michael Faraday) being a phrase readers may find thrumming in at the back of their minds as they tear through the chapters of this short new hyper-parabolic novel, When We Cease to Understand the World , (just out from NYR Books in the US), a work of “fictive nonfiction” in the coinage of its prodigiously gifted young Chilean author, Benjamin Labatut. But beautiful, they may slowly came to realize, in the specifically Rilkean sense (beauty being “nothing but the beginning of a terror we can only just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us”); for the angels this novel’s protagonists--several of the greatest physicists and mathematicians of the early twentieth century (Haber, Einstein, Schwarzschild, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Griesedieck, among others)--take to wrestling, vertiginously, along the very rim of the yawning dawning abyss of quantum mechanics, are...

As we have already seen in the current series, Walter Murch is a man of many parts. Moving on from that interest in the rampant appearance of golden ratios across faces and screens which he displayed our last time out, this time the eminent film and sound editor will be delving into a wider and more longterm sidebar passion of his: deciphering the uncanny mathematics undergirding the Egyptian pyramids and the possible significance of those astonishingly exacting proportions. It’s not just the way that across an astonishingly brief period (the 120 years from 2624 through 2504 BC) the bronze-age Egyptians managed to fashion over 20 million tons of limestone and granite blocks into five structures taller than any that would be matched anywhere in the world across the ensuing almost 4500 years, indeed right up until the middle of the last century—it’s that their engineers and designers did so, or so Murch has come to...

It is becoming increasingly clear that technological fixes and short-term policies are insufficient to redirect humanity’s unsustainable trajectory. Education has been identified as a key enabler in achieving the United Nations Global Goals and averting the worst effects of climate change. According to UNESCO (2018), Education focused on Sustainable Development (ESD) “encourages changes in knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to enable a more sustainable and just society for all” by empowering and equipping “current and future generations to meet their needs using a balanced and integrated approach to the economic, social and environmental dimensions.” ESD is about more than revising school curriculum—it’s about rethinking how we learn, where we learn, and who we consider to be “students” and “teachers”.  We all have something to learn, and we all have something to teach. To get out of our current predicament, it’s going to take all of us working together, across traditional borders of subjects, sectors, and...

Education is a transformative pursuit; individuals come together and engage in transformative interactions and experiences. As with many forms of structural invention, the consequences of thoughtful invention within the structures of education are ultimately unique spaces. The spaces of education are participants in the construction of knowledge. What we ‘know’ is constructed not only within us, or the exterior world, but in-fact between the world and our experience of it. This opens the possibility of education as a communicative exchange between individuals, their social environment, and the spaces they inhabit. Our spaces of education ultimately can afford us the possibility of inhabiting our questions and creating an architectonics of curiosity. In this talk Professor Gersten will address these questions from a number of perspectives, specifically looking at the interdependence of education and the spaces of education.

It is becoming increasingly clear that technological fixes and short-term policies are insufficient to redirect humanity’s unsustainable trajectory. Education has been identified as a key enabler in achieving the United Nations Global Goals and averting the worst effects of climate change. According to UNESCO (2018), Education focused on Sustainable Development (ESD) “encourages changes in knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to enable a more sustainable and just society for all” by empowering and equipping “current and future generations to meet their needs using a balanced and integrated approach to the economic, social and environmental dimensions.” ESD is about more than revising school curriculum—it’s about rethinking how we learn, where we learn, and who we consider to be “students” and “teachers”.  We all have something to learn, and we all have something to teach. To get out of our current predicament, it’s going to take all of us working together, across traditional borders of subjects, sectors, and...

archi-poetry makes room for poetry and architecture to meet archi-poetry throws them together, an embrace - in question archi-poetry precedes us - we awake in its wake — “_ifesto” (2018) In response to difficult questions, this event offers collaborative experiments aimed at renewing the architecture, theatre and poetry of the world.  “What is poetry? The very soul of adventure… which creates a situation.”— Louis Sullivan  The root of poetry (poiesis in Greek) simply means “making” — human making of almost anything: shoes, boats, buildings, characters in a play. Poiesis also names the art of poetry: spoken, written or sung. Understanding poetry as human making, makes the poetry of architecture easier to comprehend, but risks obscuring poetry’s meaningful, musical, and magical complexity. “It’s not just building… it’s building worlds.” — John Hejduk Architectural imagination suspends disbelief in the shared dream that human situations can embody and inspire poetic experience. Every act toward this goal can be...

LOOM · ROOM · HARP weaves together inside and outside, near and far, visible and invisible, artifacts of the past and actions in the present, through the infilled colonnade of the Anderson Gallery at Drake University, in Des Moines, Iowa. This site-specific installation and series of performances taking place periodically from September 2 through October 15, 2021, is a collaboration between Fırat Erdim, Paula Matthusen, and Olivia Valentine.The performances are accessible both in-person and online, via the loom-room-harp.space website and Sunship, the website of the Arts Letters & Numbers 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale Italian Virtual Pavilion at artslettersandnumbers.org. Throughout the course of the exhibition, the gallery contains dynamic visual and audio artifacts of the periodic performances. Together, these artifacts, performances, and other components of the installation seek to permeate interior with exterior, here with there, now with then. Format of event: Continuous Online Exhibition, Online Performance, Panel Discussion  Cost to participant: Free Date and time:  Panel Discussion | September 30, 2pm CSTContinuous Online...

The research project “play-things” takes its namesake from its study subject reviewing the influence of technological environment on architecture and space, part of an ongoing investigation into perception and experience framed by technology. Building is a key artefact of our cultural history, and its image is often borrowed to construct an accessible “past” where common memory and individual experience join. “Play-things” refers to a child’s approach to space in everyday life unhindered by their functional context, economic values, political ideologies, and historical meaning. In trying to transcend the conflict and misunderstanding between general and professional training’s understanding of space, the project attempts to unmask the spirit beneath the ostensibly urbanized China since the beginning of the new century. How do we mobilise our digital artefacts to effectively represent and present our creative process, our ideas, or our positions? This workshop explores the use of video, 3D and time-based media as a dynamic design tool. Through...

Live conversation with Max Sandred, Örjan Sandred and Hans Tutschku, introduced by Lisa Landrum. Saturday, September 11, 2021 at 12:00pm EDT (11:00am CDT). What is the pulse of a city when citizens go silent? What are the scenes of a city when society recedes? What qualities and processes remain when everyday activities are abandoned? As the city enters a state of “Lockdown,” the urban environment loses its most distinctive element: human presence. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to consider the city abandoned. As human activity withdraws, other processes and activities come into focus. Cars pass through empty streets, trees sway in deserted parks, birds roam uninhabited spaces. In Sonic Trails: Lockdown, visitors are immersed in various events of a lockdown city occurring regardless of their presence. Using multiple audio-visual samples of these urban phenomena, the installation creates a new inhabitable place using layered projections and four loudspeakers. Artificial intelligence algorithms determine the composition of...

In the last few decades, US Space Agency NASA has constructed an astonishingly vast, kinetic, architectonic structure, one spanning the entire Solar System. This ever-evolving edifice comprises recognizably architectural forms: the buildings of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California; NASA HQ in Washington and various mission control centers; a global network of giant dish antennae; and rocket assembly, testing and launching facilities. But these would be meaningless without another principal component: the intricate spacecraft it has sent vaulting to all the major worlds of our planetary system, and the football-field sized International Space Station. Some of these extraordinarily advanced interplanetary robots are no bigger than a grand piano, and the largest is a bit smaller than a city bus. A cat’s-cradle webwork of signals connects them to Earth, its chains of zeroes and ones slinging across the void and returning images and data. Together this system—conceptual structure and carefully designed complex of inquisitive, communicative, propulsive,...

Michael Benson, Chris Rose and Andreas Mershin have over the past few years conducted many far ranging conversations and collaborations at the margins of human ideas and capabilities, and look forward to sharing information, ideas, and developments through these. The three live discussions will approach the energy that arises from collaboration between leading practitioners at the forefront of the sciences, arts, language and the cosmos; small and large. Arts Letters & Numbers founding director David Gersten is pleased to join three of our Visiting Artists in presenting this public discussion series as a part of the exhibition “SunShip: The Arc that Makes the Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

Michael Benson, Chris Rose and Andreas Mershin have over the past few years conducted many far ranging conversations and collaborations at the margins of human ideas and capabilities, and look forward to sharing information, ideas, and developments through these. The three live discussions will approach the energy that arises from collaboration between leading practitioners at the forefront of the sciences, arts, language and the cosmos; small and large. Arts Letters & Numbers founding director David Gersten is pleased to join three of our Visiting Artists in presenting this public discussion series as a part of the exhibition “SunShip: The Arc that Makes the Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

Michael Benson, Chris Rose and Andreas Mershin have over the past few years conducted many far ranging conversations and collaborations at the margins of human ideas and capabilities, and look forward to sharing information, ideas, and developments through these. The three live discussions will approach the energy that arises from collaboration between leading practitioners at the forefront of the sciences, arts, language and the cosmos; small and large. Arts Letters & Numbers founding director David Gersten is pleased to join three of our Visiting Artists in presenting this public discussion series as a part of the exhibition “SunShip: The Arc that Makes the Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

That Riva Lehrer is alive at all is a matter of remarkable luck and coincidence. Had it not been for the fact that in 1958, her mother was working as a researcher in a lab doing groundbreaking work on natal anomalies, Ms. Lehrer might not have long survived her birth. But she benefited from both innovative surgeries—and the visionary attentions of that mother. Now, decades later, Ms. Lehrer has become a leading figure in Disability Culture in the United States, known internationally as a portrait artist whose work challenges staid conceptions of beauty, through images that depict the power and allure of variant bodies—and lives.  On this occasion (as it happens, of the 46th anniversary of the death of her mother), Ms Lehrer will be conversing with Lawrence Weschler, who last year blurbed her extraordinary new memoir, Golem Girl, as follows:  “Oy, what a story: Job, eat your heart out! In Riva Lehrer’s life chronicle,...

In his spare time, Walter Murch--the legendary sound and film editor behind such classics as the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient—pursues all manner of marvellous side passions: transposing the uncanny journalism of the Italian midcentury master Curzio Malaparte into English poetry; resurrecting long-abandoned theories of gravitational astroacoustics (subject of Weschler’s recent book, Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of the Astrophysicists); deciphering the geometry of the Egyptian pyramids; chronicling the art of his eminent painter father, Walter Tandy Murch; and now, approaching his own eightieth year, completing Suddenly Something Clicked, a combination memoir cum successor to his seminal 1995 meditation on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye. As part of this last project, Murch has been making all sorts of unexpected discoveries, including astonishing observations concerning the way the Golden Ratio φ (1.618…) keeps showing up, not only in spiralling galaxies, DNA, and sunflower pods—but also...

 At first the thing presents itself as a thick black monolith, hovering in midair at the heart of a gleaming white cube of a room—or wait, not a monolith, twomonoliths perpendicularly wedged, the one fast against the other.  And nested there, four feet out from where the dense black plinths intersect, floats an amorphous immaterial globe of light, which seems to bob in rhythm with each step the visitor takes toward it, or rather toward the crowd of other visitors already gathered round it, drop jawed before the stupefying apparition.  But go ahead, join them, and in fact summon up the gumption to step between them so as to lean your head intothe ball of light, at which point, like magic, the entire black edifice will simply disappear. Welcome to Aperture Lucida, the latest creation of the young Southern California magus, Tristan Duke, product of over two years work as artist in residence alongside fellow...

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, professor emeritus of McGill University, discusses his book Attunement: Architecture After the Crisis of Modern Science, accompanied by David Gersten, founding director of Arts Letters & Numbers. This public talk  is presented as part of  “SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. Architecture remains in crisis, its social relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and technical sustainability. This lecture discusses possibilities for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities, an architecture that is connected--attuned--to its location and its inhabitants. Architecture, a multisensory--not pictorial--experience, operates as a communicative setting for societies; its beauty and its meaning lie in its connection to human health and self-understanding.Drawing on recent work in embodied cognition, the lecture argues that the environment, including the built environment, matters not only as a material ecology but...

Arts Letters & Numbers founding director David Gersten and Louise Pelletier, director of the UQAM Design Centre and Arts Letters & Numbers visiting artist, are pleased to collaborate in presenting this public panel discussion of the exhibition ÉCRAN TOTAL/TOTAL SCREEN. The Artist and Curators Talk will be the opportunity to hear Penelope Umbrico describe her latest work: Out of Order / eBay (Broken Screens on Screen and Broken Screens), a multimedia installation that confronts us with the materiality of the screen as a solid interface between the ‘here’ of our physical being and the ‘there’ of intangible information. Through multiplied screens, it appears to us as a projection surface that we gaze upon, but that we are never quite able to see. About ÉCRAN TOTAL / TOTAL SCREEN: Presented at the UQAM Design Centre in Montreal, Canada, the exhibition ÉCRAN TOTAL/TOTAL SCREEN features Jean Baudrillard’s photographs in conversation with pieces by Penelope Umbrico, Mishka Henner...