On May 9th, 2014 Arts Letters & Numbers acquired the house on the hill above the mill. Built in 1859, this house previously served as the original mill owner’s residence. Now it will become the residence for Arts Letters & Numbers ongoing programs.

A film of David Gersten’s talk ‘look now away closely’ presented in the Interdisciplinary Seminar at The Cooper Union on September 8, 2015. In this talk, David addresses questions of transformation from a number of perspectives, specifically looking at the interdependence of our conceptions of risk and our spaces of education.

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.

'Circles: Drawing on Friendship' was the first of the Art, Letters & Numbers workshops to be held in our Mill in Upstate New York.

In the Summer of 2018, Our 7th Summer Workshop gathered over 40 people from over 20 countries, creating and sharing works: artists, filmmakers, musicians, composers, physicists, activists, poets, mathematicians, photographers, actors, architects, sound artists, policy makers, mimes, chefs, scientists and more!

Penelope Umbrico, Louise Pelletier, and the curatorial team behind the Écran Total/Total Screen exhibition join David Gersten of Arts Letters & Numbers to look at work from the exhibition and discuss the legacy of Jean Baudrillard's ideas today.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 …

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. Zoom, as it were, avant la lettre.

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.

An incredibly rare, personal and insightful dialogue with composer/performer Terry Riley from the Creative Music Online program in August 2021 including stories about Riley's connections with Indian music guru Pandit Pran Nath and composers John Cage and La Monte Young as well as an in depth discussion about how Riley created his seminal work "In C”. Moderated by Riley’s long-time friend and student, program director, Michael Harrison, with questions from participating composers.

In collaboration with the Community Bookstore of Brooklyn. “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.

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.

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.

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 …

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.

Design and Existential Risk is a series of conversations with leading thinkers, designers, and educators who critically question how the practice of design can imagine and prepare for extreme existential risks. The series explores the ways design thinking engages sustainability and human survival now and in the future.

Professor David Gersten AR'91 explains why the new Civic Projects Lab serves as a crossroad for students, faculty, and staff from across Cooper Union's three schools to address the civic questions of our time and how the space can be used for collaborative making. Gersten is Distinguished Adjunct in The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union.

Gersten regularly collaborates with and advises international organizations, educational and cultural institutions, as well as, education policy groups on a wide range of subjects, including: art / science / humanities collaborations, the United Nations SDG’s and the future of education. He recently: presented a keynote address entitled ‘Unlocking the Creativity of Youth’ at the UNICEF – EXPO, as well as, at the Chancellors Summit held at CAFA in Beijing.

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.

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. In collaboration with Power Station of Art Shanghai (PSA)

Arts Letters & Numbers is pleased to announce an hybrid event in collaboration with 'The Truant School' located in France, a Talk / Conversation on Education and Arts which will be held on Friday July 22 at noon EST. ALN founding director David Gersten will be speaking from the Barn at ALN with artist Alan Ruiz and the ‘The Truant School’ group.

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 …

In this poetic speech, David Gersten, founding director of Arts Letters & Numbers, provides profound insights into spatial literacy as he delves into the complex richness of the conversations between our surroundings and how they shape our experiences.

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Professor David Gersten’s 2022 address to admitted students and their parents and guests. Gersten is Distinguished Professor Adjunct in The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union.