PAST PROGRAMS

season 2016

Zoëtrope Sun

Summer Workshop / Residency

07–08.2016

Averill Park, NY, United States

If you ask a physicist about light, they will say it’s fundamental to their work. If you ask a photographer about light, they will say it’s fundamental to their work. If you ask a painter about light, they will also affirm that light is fundamental to their work. An astronomer, a filmmaker, a biologist, an architect, all will say light is fundamental to their work. Often light exposes both the commonalities and distinctions between disciplines and this can be of great value in illuminating the questions of an individual work within any given discipline.

Description (Zoëtrope Sun)

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”.

Our Solar System contains countless Zoëtropes. The Earth itself can be understood as a Zoëtrope as its surfaces ceaselessly turn through state-changes. The sun’s heat establishes a filter for its light as the clouds form a floating blanket of evaporation, absorbing from below, backlit from above. Many suns are caught, held up by this parasol of evaporation, as some rays pass through, projecting upon the surfaces below. Then drops of rain fall, returning to the total, each reflecting their own sun, each forming a brief circle upon re-entry, an ungovernable storm of geometry, and then a rainbow.

The Zoëtrope Sun workshop sparked many collaboration opportunities with people and organizations near and far. One of these was the creation of the music program, a new component of the workshop that was led by Musician/Composer Michael Harrison. We once again set the stage for the next phase in the evolution of the Arts Letters & Numbers project. Summer 2016 saw the dawn of the rising Zoëtrope Sun.

Recognizing the immense creative blossoms that emerge from the workshop environment, we decided to expand the single night final performance that we have done annually so far to a two day multiple-stage, multiple-event festival, set on the site of the workshop.

It encompassed the performances, music, exhibits, food events, poetry, and presentations that unfolded from the diverse interactions born of and borne by the workshop environment. We also saw this year's festival as a great opportunity to open up Arts Letters and Numbers to the public and imagine ALN as an active place of artistic flourish in the Town.