“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.

The Earth Of: Ruptures and Reckonings is a collective virtual space of inquiry. Through writing and discourse we investigate how to manifest and inhabit the fractures that pervade our lives, allowing for the creative space to grow organically through digressions, tangents, musings, and synchronistic linkages.

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.

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…

Over the past several decades, Los Angeles based photographer Ken Gonzales-Day has been engaged in one of the most trenchant and consequential explorations both of the historical reality of lynching and of the aesthetic and ethical complications involved in blithe latter day cultural appropriations of incidents which from the very start had been cast as prurient spectacles.

Sonic Trails is an immersive multimedia polyphony, layering sights, sounds, echoes and rhythms of a city in lockdown. Though seemingly devoid of people, this world is not without pulse. This immersive installation awakens an ambient social imaginary within the persistent sensorium of music and architecture.

In the brutal winter of 2013, curator Rhoda Rosen and artist Billy McGuiness, living at opposite ends of the 26-mile-long north-south Red Line of Chicago’s metro service, launched a practice of preparing home cooked meals every Saturday night and going out to the blustery platforms at one end of the line or the other to share them (with proper tablecloths, plates and silverware) with some of the people experiencing homelessness who had taken to living out their nights on the metro trains and were being forced to disembark between rides…

Someday, decades and decades hence, following some sort of terrible ecological collapse, all mankind has been reduced to living underground, in hexagonal rooms “like the cells of a bee” with no apertures and throbbing ventilation, each cell containing a single individual, though everyone is connected to everyone else by way of a vast hive of intermeshed video screens…

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.

This two-part experimental workshop will examine the poetics of Line and Stitch and the ways in which drawing may be used in our everyday practices. We will explore the relationship between drawing and the architecture of the everyday: from the ways a line may be employed as a divider that separates the self from (an)other; to drawing as a form of embodied meaning-making and storytelling across time and space.

An interrupted dialogue taking place during a feast: city noises, words mis-spelled or etymologically mis-routed, prudency, a muddy journey through the dark meanders of the city, lately arrived guests, edible monuments, non-edibles … and on-going negotiations on some allegorical roles. One curiously accepts the role of the cauldron, the other speculates on the potential persona of the fork and one other still searches for her role…

The Ark is the last architecture before The Flood and the first architecture after The Flood; a hinge between two worlds. What if the Ark is an Arc in Time—Arc as in a curve—slowing time, aligning it with Life Time? The Flood would not be a destructive event, but a place of and for life. 

A three-hour nonstop performance with video and audio recordings by 26 composers, performers and interdisciplinary artists of works that were created mostly during the Creative Music Online program in August 2021. Highlights include world premieres of 8 works written specifically for Del Sol String Quartet, and performances by Creative Music Online director Michael Harrison and faculty members Vadim Neselovskyi, Payton MacDonald, and Reiko Fueting’s Passage Time performed by violinist Miranda Cuckson.

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…

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…