Conversation with Alberto Perez Gomez

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.

NOW: is a pre-enactment of Galapagos Now: and the first action in the Galapagos Project. Simultaneous live events were enacted between the Mill, and Galerie Subsuelo in Berlin. During a five day span, both locations hosted a series of 'Now:s', actions within the duality that collapsed time and space.

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.

"Exquisite Broken Circle" an Arts, Letters & Numbers workshop was held at Brown University. Conceived of as an embodied "exquisite corpse," participants from multidisciplinary backgrounds engage in action, re-action and reenactment within the construction of two half-circle arcs set back to back. Within each arc space of performance, a set of live-feed cameras and projections loop the image(s) and the performer(s) in an infinite mirror of responsive and repetitive movement that creates a dialogue between the performers and each set of actions.

Arts, Letters & Numbers was excited to host our first Mill Talk with guest speaker, Professor Remo Guidieri. After a delicious kebab lunch-in, guests gathered to hear an introduction by David Gersten followed by a lecture by Professor Guidieri, titled ‘Argonauts Anthology’. It was a beautiful day in the country filled with foods, drinks, fire and conversation in our newly renovated Mill.

‘Circles: Drawing on Friendship’ was the first of the Art, Letters & Numbers workshops to be held in our Mill in Upstate New York. Through a deep intellectual, emotional, and creative questioning, we drew up a series of works and created new structures, new spaces, new stories which culminated in a celebratory performance. The collective creative urgency was a crucible of emotive precision from which we pour the foundation for our future workshops.

The 'Aarhus Arc' was built by 150 master students at the Aarhus School of Architecture. In an act reminiscent of the Globe Theater, the arc was carried in large segments through the snow and (re)constructed within the school’s theatre. Performing as a wall, a drawing board/film screen, it divided the space, inviting people to whisper through it, draw through it, cut through it. Through these acts of empathy for those on the other side, the arc transformed into an architecture, a theater, a film, a drawing, a conversation, an action, a school, and a contribution to a city culminating in a series of performances of magical moments, smoke and fire!

The 'Open Book' Workshop was an initial step towards what has become Arts Letters & Numbers. The students from the studio "Making Real" participated in this collaborative workshop orchestrated by David Gersten and Anne Romme. The workshop explored the interrelations between gravity, bodies, drawing, time through inhabiting plans on floors, sections on walls, and the space in between.

The architectural act of building the model, created and contained the deep relationships between care, craft and community; Craft gathers us together, through the collective actions of constructing a model of the school, a community was formed, a remarkable connective tissue emerged within the studio. This structure, this social contract ultimately embodies The Cooper Union.

I am the aperture. I am the shutter. I am the focus. I am the camera.