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. Arts Letters & Numbers founding director David Gersten is pleased to join three longtime Visiting Artists in presenting this public discussion series as a part of the exhibition “SunShip: The Arc that Makes the Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

Andreas Mershin, PhD Research Scientist, Director, Label-Free Research Group, Center for Bits and Atoms,Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His group among other things has developed, using machine learning, a smartphone sized device that emulates what trained dogs can do in detecting disease conditions in half a second. He has collaborated with Chris Rose several times in running 'BioDesign Studio' at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, R.I.

Michel Benson is a writer, filmmaker, and artist who has over the last few years staged a series of international museum exhibitions of large format planetary landscape photographs. His last book Cosmigraphics was shortlisted for a Los Angeles Times book prize. He has contributed to many publications including the New York Times, Rolling Stone and The Washington Post and is a Fellow of the New York Institute for Humanities.

Chris Rose, MDes RCA, is a designer, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Art, London. He invented and ran the Biodesign Studio Class for Graduate Students at the Nature Lab, RISD, where he also taught Furniture and Architectural design. His interest in imaging ideas connects the work of Andreas and Michael together at differing scales and times.