“The universe is made of stories not of atoms”  -Muriel Rukeyser

We are pleased to present ‘Hunting Life; A Forever House’ an exhibition of drawings, stories, and structures by David Gersten. This work began in 1990 as David Gersten’s thesis in Architecture at the Cooper Union School of Architecture. The work continued over a ten-year period between 1990-2000. The continuous creative dialogue with Dean John Hejduk and the long-established creative community of the Cooper Union were central to the creation of this work…

A virtual exhibition of Camera Obscuras and Drawings by Homa Shojaie.

This film premiered and was initially commissioned as part of “SunShip; The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CityXVenice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

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.

A short video, “Layering Community on the Wynantskill,” introduces a project initiated by the question “How Will We Live Together?” Actions and workshops over the last months have explored local layers of geology, geography, and history of both structures and people, with engagement from the community at several levels…

What if myth were not a lie but a story truer than truth? This powerfully intimate work enacts wonder, desire and denial across cosmic, cultural and artistic thresholds, with puppets, masked dancers, and digital animation. A specially designed theatre for one heightens the drama of encounter with this elusive deity of doorways…

It is with great joy that we announce ANTIPOLIS an exhibition of works by Armand Biglari. This exhibition contains five bodies of work, each pursued during a period of intense concentration and exploration. Through his deep intellect, ethos of precision, and exploratory mind, Armand Biglari reveals spaces of the human condition, each mark, at once archaic and radically new, speak of our ineffable depth.

Swifts are fast flying birds who spend their lives in the air. In late summer evenings, towards dusk, they perform magnificent aerial dances in large flocks. The form of the dance is elusive. It is seemingly unorchestrated and improvised, crystallizing in moments of grand collective gestures or dissipating into fragmentary, individual trajectories. A three dimensional choreography that is impossible to predict and hard to describe yet breathtakingly beautiful…

"The Architecture of Public Spaces as Museums: The case of MOMAFAD" at EMST - Temporary Exhibitions Space (-1), is the inauguration of the 1st MOMAFAD and is being held as part of “SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Number’s exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

“There is an ultimate space in my life where I engage in the meaning-making of my being. It is hard to reach this space very often. It demands seeking an internal path within one’s self in a moment of truth. It is either transpiring or not! If it does, it can vanish quickly…”

In Search Of An Alternative Habitat For The Written Word is a Zoom-based three-session workshop hopes to open a conversation engaging diverse voices through the language and space of the written word. The workshop introduces concepts of self-expression in creating space through the medium of calligraphy…

“Eureka! - I found it!” This famous exclamation of Archimedes as he discovered the law of buoyancy in a bathtub captures the joy of embodied knowledge and heuristic experience. How can dramatic arts infuse architectural pedagogy with Eureka potential, while fostering creative collaboration and ethical imagination? This dialogue among architectural educators reflects on recent theatrical experiments and dramatic approaches to design education.

The Del Sol Composer Incubator was created in 2020 to offer early career composers the chance to work in-depth with Del Sol over the course of 6 months on unique musical projects. By providing ample collaborative time, the quartet will work with these composers to think critically about the role of activism, performance venue, and concert presentation while writing a work for string quartet. This concert presents the works by the 3 inaugural composers.

In April 2020, early into our first Covid lockdown, David (Gersten) began a series of weekly Zoom chats with members of the ALN community that included family, friends, friends of friends. Under the wide umbrella, of “the pause moment” participants would gather virtually to share their experiences, suspended as we all were from our normal day to day activities. It was a healing experience — intimate, esoteric, and diverse. Any given meeting was part bull session, prayer meeting, meditation, rant, riff, communal kvetch.

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 which, come five in the evening, when the trucks descend and the limos return, reverts to its largely Anglo basis”).

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…

“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.