by Ghost Tickle
Live art you can cut bread with in eleven acts
A progressive feast of in-situ performance pieces

The 2022 Summer Creative Music Intensive was a two-week hybrid program ( In-person & Online ) held from August 14th – 28th at Arts Letters & Numbers. Participants were immersed in the creative process of making and performing music, exploring new approaches and developing individual and collaborative works as creative artists.

The 2022 Summer SunShip Thesis was a three-week hybrid program ( in-person & online ) held from July 23rd to August 14th 2022 with both in-person participants at ALN campus and online participants from different places of the world. This unique multi-disciplinary thesis program was led by ALN founding director David Gersten and ALN recurring visiting artist Homa Shojaie.

Together, Revolution: Thesis at ALN and the Summer Residency created a framework for Summer at ALN 2019, which brought people from 13 countries, to participate in the programs. While each of these programs had its own unique character, they both offered space for people to pursue their questions in conversation with others and create emergent works within a creative community.

In the shape of a festival - Come Make with Us, as the title hints, was an invitation to the community to experience and participate in the many works created during 'Summer at ALN'. Through multiple forms and medias, the works created a platform for interactions between the audience, the artists, the spaces and the continuous unfolding of the questions.

Hinges, Mirrors & Eclipses is grounded in the idea that the spatial, poetic and material imaginations provide a unique means of registering and creating transformation, of engaging the world and making a contribution. Working from the principle that our capacity to act in the world is rooted in our capacity to recognize and comprehend transformation, the workshop covers a large arc of content, asking questions of our world, our disciplines and our humanity.

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. A space where many elements could come together to create the alchemy of transforming how we experience today into how we will experience tomorrow.

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”.

Today, education in the broadest sense holds the capacity of developing new pathways of interaction and forms of knowledge that address the challenges of our increasingly complex world. Arts Letters & Numbers is a space to understand, withstand and ultimately create transformation that embodies our best hopes and aspirations. Like many complex systems such as language or molecular structures, disciplines are polymorphic, they transform relationally, taking on different structures, forms and organizations depending on their disciplinary environment. Knowledge evolves; creating situations of proximity and interaction among a great diversity of forms of knowledge gives rise to mutual transformation, builds new linkages, new thought processes, new questions and new works.

Today, education in the broadest sense holds the capacity of developing new pathways of interaction and forms of knowledge that address the challenges of our increasingly complex world. Arts Letters & Numbers is a space to understand, withstand and ultimately create transformation that embodies our best hopes and aspirations. Like many complex systems such as language or molecular structures, disciplines are polymorphic, they transform relationally, taking on different structures, forms and organizations depending on their disciplinary environment. Knowledge evolves; creating situations of proximity and interaction among a great diversity of forms of knowledge gives rise to mutual transformation, builds new linkages, new thought processes, new questions and new works.

The 2013 summer's workshop grew out of the perfect combination of planning and poetry. Building from the experiences of our first summer workshop, and incorporating discoveries found through our recent work, we developed this summer’s workshop titled ‘Exquisite Broken Circle; Suddenly a Chora’. Structured through six disciplines; construction, drawing, film/photography, writing, theater and music/sound the workshop was conceived of as a disciplinary exquisite corpse. Each of these disciplines worked in parallel and in close proximity, directly interacting though a framework of shared questions and actions.

‘Circles: Drawing on Friendship’ was the first of the Art, Letters & Numbers workshops to be held in our Mill in Upstate New York. Through a deep intellectual, emotional, and creative questioning, we drew up a series of works and created new structures, new spaces, new stories which culminated in a celebratory performance. The collective creative urgency was a crucible of emotive precision from which we pour the foundation for our future workshops.