REGISTRATION FOR CRAFT 1o1 IS NOW OPEN
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REGISTRATION FOR CRAFT 1o1 IS NOW OPEN –
Craft 1o1
Arts Letters and Numbers is excited to introduce Craft 1o1, a new model of education grounded in an ethos defined by listening, mentorship and collaboration. Craft 1o1 brings a wide spectrum of practices —material, spatial, and poetic— into close proximity, with the hope of deepening experiences, relationships, and understandings.
Between July 1 and Aug 30, over twenty programs will occur on and around our Averill Park Campus. We aim to create an atmosphere of both depth and openness, offering participants unique skills and learning experiences.
Craft 1o1 aims to revolutionize the educational landscape. At the heart of this vision lies a commitment to prioritizing the unique interests of each person through a transformative framework. The structure will be completely porous, empowering people to freely explore their curiosities. We encourage participants to join multiple programs, and move freely between them, discovering their interests and charting their paths as they go.
1o1 Participation
Craft 1o1 is open to resident participants, who will stay at our campus, as well as non-resident participants, (including local community members) who will join us daily. Non-resident participants must be ages 14+, while resident participants must be ages 18+. Youth participants (ages 14-22) will have the opportunity to join the B-Unbound mentorship community, through our partnership with Big Picture Learning.
1o1 Foundations:
Craft is a culture of listening
Craft is a culture of listening, of noticing, of paying attention to materials, people, atmospheres, and environments. Much like in music, the cultures of craft find their greatest nuance within the subtleties of practice. For example: in welding, after much practice, we understand why it is called a ‘blow torch’; the heat of the torch transforms the solid steel into liquid, it is the air, ever so gently blowing within the flame that moves the liquid steel along the joint creating a welded bead. What could be more nuanced and sensitive than moving liquid along a seam with the breath of the torch? Or, when we learn how to gently tie a string to a cotton ball and pull it through an electrical conduit by holding a vacuum at one end and then use that string to pull wires through the conduit. Craft is full of these deeply nuanced forms of listening and acting. Many of these subtle forms of communication have resonance with a wide spectrum of practices in the arts and humanities. As an example, the breath of a torch in welding can be heard in the breath moving through a flute or oboe, or the voice of an actor on stage. Line weights in drawing find echoes in the string line and cotton ball. Learning to listen to our works, to the subtleties of material interactions, we are learning to listen to each other, to listen to the world.
Drawing on decades of experience and our extensive network of collaborations, Craft 1o1 brings together a wide range of craftspeople, artists, artisans, and researchers to share knowledge and guide specific programs across five broad categories: Construction, Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Machine Mechanics, and the Humanities. Within these broad categories, we will have multiple workshops: from metalsmithing to music to mechanics, from plumbing to painting to poetry, filmmaking to fashion design, drawing to dance, and textiles to theater. Our overarching hope in gathering together this wide spectrum of ‘ways of knowing’ is to create opportunities for deep immersion within each program and to build bridges of interaction between the programs as people discover their interests and craft their educational experiences.
1on1 Mentorships:
Developing meaningful, nurturing relationships
“When I was about 10 years old, I was in a truck, it was actually a truck that I was building with a wonderful man named Bear. I grew up in a family of truck builders, we started with wagons and sleighs in the 1890s. Bear and I were putting the thin steel skin on the structure of a tractor-trailer; you use rivets to hold the skin in place, and at that time this was a two-person job, one shot the rivet from the outside and one on the inside to block the rivet so it would splay out and pull the skin tight to the structure. I was on the inside and Bear made me a small piece of steel to hold against the hole so as he shot the rivet, it would hit the steel and open up. He shaped the steel block like a gun that I could hold against the hole, I was a kid. There were lots and lots of holes and this created an interesting situation when one person is on the inside and one on the outside you can’t run to the back of the truck between each rivet and speak to each other, you need to be able to get a rhythm and communicate through the wall so you can keep moving, up and down the line of holes. You tap the steel, set the pin, and you find a rhythm in the work. It was a kind of dance, with me moving the steel block, staying just ahead of Bear, blocking each hole before he shot, we were whispering through the wall with our movements. As Bear was teaching me this, he said ‘You have to know where I’m heading so that I know you are gonna be there when I get there.” David Gersten
We don’t experience ‘things’ we experience ‘relationships’, all experience can be understood as relational: light enters a room through a window, illuminating a table whose legs are resisting gravity to hold the book containing an ancient tale. A gentle voice reads to a small group of people sitting around the table. As they listen, they imagine the worlds expressed in the story, the words move between them and within them. The experience emerges atmospherically: the light, window, table, gravity, voice, text, time, imagination, memory and so much more are brought into relational interaction. They float inhabiting the words, the story, and the chairs holding them up in the light of the room. Education is not the transference of information, it is the relationships between people that foster emergent understanding and atmospheres of possibility.
Mentorship is an essential relationship of education, across all crafts, disciplines, and ways of knowing. Through the deeply human interactions of mentorship, experience understanding, and knowledge are communicated
The range of programs presented throughout the 9 weeks of Craft 101 will be led by many people from local, regional, national, and international communities. These individuals will collaborate with, mentor, and support program participants from equally diverse backgrounds, including local youth, artists, and artisans of all disciplines and ages from around the world. This mixing and mingling of people of diverse experiences sets the stage for interaction, mentorship, and profound individual and collective transformation.
1oh1 Discovery:
Finding our pathways through peripheral vision
When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.
-Alexander den Heijer
Pathways of interaction: When two elements are placed in close proximity to one another they interact, influencing each other's properties without direct contact, objects may develop an electric charge and experience attraction or repulsion depending on the signs of their charges. According to quantum mechanics, particles can tunnel through energy barriers even when they do not possess enough energy to overcome them. Such phenomena can inform our understanding of educational models. Multiple disciplines create the potential for dynamic interactions and entanglements. Embracing porosity and communication within disciplinary geographies where diverse voices interact, creates the opportunity for building linkages, for new thought processes, new questions, and new works. Central to this principle is the reciprocal amplification that occurs when diverse modes of thought are brought into direct engagement. As with musical instruments, concentrated individual practice is essential to the development of one’s discipline. In concert, the proximity and interaction of multiple instruments create complex harmonics that often exceed the expectations of any individual participant. The interaction among diverse instruments leads to the emergence of polyphonic structures which are often richer and more nuanced than the sum of the individual voices. These interactions do not diminish the individual instruments but amplify them, and the depth and concentration of each practice/discipline are essential to the robust interactions between them.
Peripheral Vision: Seeing is commonly perceived as an intentional engagement with the world. It occurs through the dual lenses of our eyes, encompassing a span of roughly 120°, out of which only the frontal 60° constitute what we readily recognize as our field of ‘vision’. The remaining half, extending 30° degrees to either side, conceals a narrative unfolding surreptitiously on the periphery—it evades capture by our visual apparatus yet somehow registered by other perceptual faculties. Those peripheral structures are structures half-built, what they require to be completed is the element of time. It is a kind of biological agreement we make with the world in front of us, that the story will always remain half-told unless we turn our gaze. What lies directly before us is a consequence of choice—the culmination of all intentionality. Yet, what is perceived, however obscurely, in the peripheral 60° is what informs and summons us down the path before us.
Craft 1o1 as an educational model reflects the underlying nature of these fundamental everyday entanglements, creating the possibilities of discovery within an expanded field of vision. Moving through this field, nuance is revealed in ways not possible when studying in isolation. Education is, by definition, a transformative pursuit, where individuals come together and engage in interactions and experiences. Craft 1o1 aims to create an atmosphere of depth and openness, encouraging people to follow their interests and move freely between a wide range of experiences discovering alternative pathways through peripheral vision. By bringing diverse disciplines into proximity and creating an open porosity between them, knowledge from one discipline permeates the learning process of another, and a synergistic effect emerges, transcending the sum of its parts. This model underscores our commitment to fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and holistic diverse learning experiences.
While each program within 'Craft 1o1' is grounded in specific forms of knowledge and may begin with specific objectives, the true beauty lies in the unexpected connections, discoveries, and insights that emerge through interaction within the full field of programs. Through this open-ended approach, we hope to broaden the spectrum of experiences understood as education, allowing for the organic evolution of ideas and experiences, embodying the intrinsic beauty of discovering our learning process and our gifts.
1of1 You:
No one is you, each person crafting their experiences
You decide to enroll in a hands-on electrical workshop - which you don’t know much about - because you don’t have much to do this summer, and it sounds interesting. The workshop is full of old broken lights and wire spools of every size and color. The teacher is an ‘old timer’ who knows what they’re doing. They show you how to take the old lights apart, how the electricity moves through them, and how to run new wires to bring them to life. The teacher is kind, shares stories, and listens as much as they talk. After a time, your teacher explains that these are theater lights and that today you are going down the hall to install them. This is careful work as you both climb the scaffolding to attach the lights to swivel brackets hanging on a grid over the performance space. You are completely focused as you and your teacher attach the lights to wires carrying power to the space. When you turn the switch, it works! Its beam floods the stage with light. Your focus shifts from the wires to the subjects now illuminated, you see people assembling a stage set, some are cutting wood, some are painting, and others are on the side of the stage rehearsing lines. What was once peripheral is coming into focus, you move the beam of light towards different parts of the stage to study the effects of this new light. Curious, you ask your teacher what is happening in the performance, and together you go to see. The people building the sets ask if you want to help, and they hand you a paintbrush. You spend the next week learning how to build sets, construction, painting, prop handling, costume design, and of course theater lighting to effectively capture the show. It all comes together! Opening night begins with the house lights dimmed. Natural light entering through a window illuminates a table holding the book of ancient tales. A gentle voice reads to a small group of people sitting around the table. You see the audience absorbed in the play. The ancient story pulls at something within you, surprisingly, and it takes your breath away. The play runs for four nights, and you go every night. At the end of the final performance the stage manager, who has also become a mentor, introduces you to the writer and director of the play who says they will be starting a new project in a few weeks where everyone will share stories to create a new play. You accept her invitation and join the project. You can’t believe this is happening, it’s all you can think about.
Craft 1o1 will come from you, from your questions, from your voices, and from your creative urgency. No one is you, and together we will discover our shared stories. The urgent need for exploratory works of empathy and ethics are as present as they have ever been. It is for all of us to listen to the unheard voices, search for unknown linkages, ask questions not yet imagined, and create the transformations that best embody our individual and collective hopes and aspirations.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. – Buckminster Fuller
1o1 Details
Location: 1543 Burden Lake Rd, Averill Park, NY 12018, United States
Dates: 1 July - 30 August
Resident Participant Pricing:
$550/week (Shared Room)
$750/week (Private Room)
$900/week (Private room for Two)
These prices cover accommodation; participation in any program taking place on site during your stay, and include three collective meals a week.
Non-Resident Participant Pricing:
$200/week, or $40/day
These prices cover participation in any and all Craft 1o1 programs taking place on campus during your selected dates, as well as three collective meals a week.
