by Ghost Tickle
Live art you can cut bread with in eleven acts
A progressive feast of in-situ performance pieces

The 2022 Summer Creative Music Intensive was a two-week hybrid program ( In-person & Online ) held from August 14th – 28th at Arts Letters & Numbers. Participants were immersed in the creative process of making and performing music, exploring new approaches and developing individual and collaborative works as creative artists.

The 2022 Summer SunShip Thesis was a three-week hybrid program ( in-person & online ) held from July 23rd to August 14th 2022 with both in-person participants at ALN campus and online participants from different places of the world. This unique multi-disciplinary thesis program was led by ALN founding director David Gersten and ALN recurring visiting artist Homa Shojaie.

Over the fall and winter of 2019, we invited a few talented artists, musicians and writers to create their work here on the Arts Letters & Numbers campus. With safety procedures in place, we offered the space and support to explore and expand creative practice. Today we present a small collection of their works made during the Pilot Light Residency.

Over 8 weeks Breaking Barriers through Movement and Dance explored the how to use the principles of modern dance to create and explore pathways toward combatting crisis. The program director Omonike Akinyemi focused particularly on movement stemming from Yoruba African dance, Martha Graham, and Katherine Dunham dance techniques.

This film premiered and was initially commissioned as part of “SunShip; The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CityXVenice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

In this talk, Professor David Gersten, will discuss the poetic, spatial imaginations, and social politics in John Hejduk’s works. He will address the poetic imagination as a dimension of human life, and a means of addressing our social political lives.

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…

What if myth were not a lie but a story truer than truth? This powerfully intimate work enacts wonder, desire and denial across cosmic, cultural and artistic thresholds, with puppets, masked dancers, and digital animation. A specially designed theatre for one heightens the drama of encounter with this elusive deity of doorways…

Swifts are fast flying birds who spend their lives in the air. In late summer evenings, towards dusk, they perform magnificent aerial dances in large flocks. The form of the dance is elusive. It is seemingly unorchestrated and improvised, crystallizing in moments of grand collective gestures or dissipating into fragmentary, individual trajectories. A three dimensional choreography that is impossible to predict and hard to describe yet breathtakingly beautiful…

“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.

The Del Sol Composer Incubator was created in 2020 to offer early career composers the chance to work in-depth with Del Sol over the course of 6 months on unique musical projects. By providing ample collaborative time, the quartet will work with these composers to think critically about the role of activism, performance venue, and concert presentation while writing a work for string quartet. This concert presents the works by the 3 inaugural composers.

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”).

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…

“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…

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…

An incredibly rare, personal and insightful dialogue with composer/performer Terry Riley from the Creative Music Online program in August 2021. Moderated by Riley’s long-time friend and student, program director, Michael Harrison, with questions from participating composers.

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.

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 creative work synthesizes a variety of performing arts, including shadow puppetry and oral storytelling, into an immersive digital animation dramatizing multicultural flood myths. In the spirit of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, global stories from eight regions meet on a rising Turtle Island, to inspire, instruct and implore mortals to care for one another and preserve Mother Earth.