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

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.

A new program was introduced by Arts Letters & Numbers in October 2019. 12 students from Averill Park High School gathered in the studios every Tuesday afternoon for 8 weeks. The program Voices of the Woods was lead by ALN fellow Natasha Holmes, supported by Associate Director Frida Foberg, fellow Jennifer Park and fellow Hyunbae Chang. 

It is night. You stand before your porcelain podium in the warm sconce light and peer into the eyes across from you. We are told to practice in the mirror before making speeches, giving presentations, attending interviews, going on dates.

Together, Revolution: Thesis at ALN and the Summer Residency created a framework for Summer at ALN 2019, which brought people from 13 countries, to participate in the programs. While each of these programs had its own unique character, they both offered space for people to pursue their questions in conversation with others and create emergent works within a creative community.

This Fall we had the great honor of contributing to the ‘Future Unknown’ Chancellor’s Summit held at The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, China.

Hinges, Mirrors & Eclipses is grounded in the idea that the spatial, poetic and material imaginations provide a unique means of registering and creating transformation, of engaging the world and making a contribution. Working from the principle that our capacity to act in the world is rooted in our capacity to recognize and comprehend transformation, the workshop covers a large arc of content, asking questions of our world, our disciplines and our humanity.

The first collaborative immersive workshop between UNICEF’s Office of Innovation and Arts Letters & Numbers was held at the Arts Letters & Numbers Mill from Dec 7th- Dec 10th.

On Tuesday November 7th our Artist in Residence Asma Mahmood invited the community for an impromptu painting workshop.

With CONSTITUTION, Arts Letters & Numbers proposed a dynamic crucible of free thought, a space where the widest spectrum of who we are could ask the questions of our time and create works that would bring us forward. A space where many elements could come together to create the alchemy of transforming how we experience today into how we will experience tomorrow.

Arts Letters & Numbers first Residency Intensive was held between January 7th and January 21st. Lead by Che Perez, Frida Foberg and Rikke Jørgensen.

In mid-November we were invited to participate in the weekend-long Alternative Art School Fair (AASF) at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, along with +50 other schools/institutions/project spaces.

This year, with the help from the Albany High School students, Noelle brought the Identity Project to Albany School of Humanities.

The book has a capacity to reach across disciplines as no discipline can renounce the book which is what makes it such a universal object/subject.

During the four-week intensive workshop, we brought together Architects, Artists, Filmmakers, Musicians, Composers, Physicists, Poets, Craftspeople, Photographers, Actors, Mimes, Chefs, Magicians, Historians, Scientists, and Scholars to co-construct a disciplinary Zoëtrope: a living system of knowledge-transformation turning within light and time, water and clouds, life and still life, cameras and projectors, nights and days, words and voices, an emergent microclimate that evokes the origins of life itself—animation, anima, zoë, life—a “Zoëtrope Sun”.

Over the course of 2 months, 40 RISD students worked closely with David Gersten and Michael Harrison. The works emerged in to ‘Galapagos In C’: an interactive, multimedia performance combining architecture, performance, and music.

Today, education in the broadest sense holds the capacity of developing new pathways of interaction and forms of knowledge that address the challenges of our increasingly complex world. Arts Letters & Numbers is a space to understand, withstand and ultimately create transformation that embodies our best hopes and aspirations. Like many complex systems such as language or molecular structures, disciplines are polymorphic, they transform relationally, taking on different structures, forms and organizations depending on their disciplinary environment. Knowledge evolves; creating situations of proximity and interaction among a great diversity of forms of knowledge gives rise to mutual transformation, builds new linkages, new thought processes, new questions and new works.

In March 2015 a group of 25 people from all over the world, and representing a wide spectrum of disciplines, convened upon a snow-covered House on the Hill to take part in “Oppenheimer’s Table” - the first in a series of Arts Letters & Numbers workshops examining and expanding upon the nature of 132 doodles generated from the secret joint committee meetings held in 1947 and chaired by Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Today, education in the broadest sense holds the capacity of developing new pathways of interaction and forms of knowledge that address the challenges of our increasingly complex world. Arts Letters & Numbers is a space to understand, withstand and ultimately create transformation that embodies our best hopes and aspirations. Like many complex systems such as language or molecular structures, disciplines are polymorphic, they transform relationally, taking on different structures, forms and organizations depending on their disciplinary environment. Knowledge evolves; creating situations of proximity and interaction among a great diversity of forms of knowledge gives rise to mutual transformation, builds new linkages, new thought processes, new questions and new works.

The 2013 summer's workshop grew out of the perfect combination of planning and poetry. Building from the experiences of our first summer workshop, and incorporating discoveries found through our recent work, we developed this summer’s workshop titled ‘Exquisite Broken Circle; Suddenly a Chora’. Structured through six disciplines; construction, drawing, film/photography, writing, theater and music/sound the workshop was conceived of as a disciplinary exquisite corpse. Each of these disciplines worked in parallel and in close proximity, directly interacting though a framework of shared questions and actions.