NOW SHOWING / Kite Choir by Firat Erdim


The Kite Choir is an ensemble of custom-made kites and sound instruments that builds upon traditions of singing kites. The sound instruments in these existing traditions are carried aloft by the kites they are attached to, as the voice-box of an assemblage brought to life by the wind. The Kite Choir instead utilizes the reel and entire tow-line of the kite as the sites of instrumentation, to promote a collaborative chain of agency between atmosphere and pilot/performer. It functions as a regime of perception, an aesthetic practice of attunement with the atmosphere.


Welcome to the ALN’s Film Room, a collection of curated films, videos, lectures and discursive events by members of the ALN community and collaborators from across the globe. This compilation spans a range of disciplines situated between various aspects of imagery, sound, cinema, contemporary art, and theory.


/ Spotlight

Walter Murch Explores The Rampancy of Golden Ratios Across Faces and Screens

Walter Murch & Lawrence Weschler

Artist and Disability Activist Riva Lehrer in conversation with Lawrence Weschler

Riva Lehrer & Lawrence Weschler

Terry Riley Stories from a Life in Music

Terry Riley & Michael Harrison

Jay Lynn (formerly Ramiro) Gomez in conversation with Ren Weschler

Jay Lynn Gomez & Lawrence Weschler

Écran Total - Artist and Curators' Panel

Penelope Umbrico, Louise Pelletier, David Gersten, Amandine Alessandra, Marine Baudrillard, Carole …

LOOM•ROOM•HARP

Fırat Erdim, Tim Ingold, Leah Kalmanson, Paula Matthusen, Olivia Valentine


Skip to Videos
  • Écran Total (Total Screen) Artist and Curators' Panel Talk

    Écran Total (Total Screen) Artist and Curators' Panel Talk

    Penelope Umbrico, Louise Pelletier, and the curatorial team behind the Écran Total/Total Screen exhibition join David Gersten of Arts Letters & Numbers to look at work from the exhibition and discuss the legacy of Jean Baudrillard's ideas today.

  • Artist and Disability Activist Riva Lehrer in conversation with Lawrence Weschler

    Artist and Disability Activist Riva Lehrer in conversation with Lawrence Weschler

    That Riva Lehrer is alive at all is a matter of remarkable luck and coincidence. Had it not been for the fact that in 1958, her mother was working as a researcher in a lab doing groundbreaking work on natal anomalies, Ms. Lehrer might not have long survived her birth. But she benefited from both innovative surgeries—and the visionary attentions of that mother.

  • Architecture of Scale (Part 3 of Three-Part Conversation)

    Architecture of Scale (Part 3 of Three-Part Conversation)

    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.

  • Paradoxing (Part 1 of Three-Part Conversation)

    Paradoxing (Part 1 of Three-Part Conversation)

    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.

  • Futuring and 2001: A Space Odyssey (Part 2 of Three-Part Conversation)

    Futuring and 2001: A Space Odyssey (Part 2 of Three-Part Conversation)

    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.

  • Rhoda Rosen in discussion with members of Chicago Red Line Service Community

    Rhoda Rosen in discussion with members of Chicago Red Line Service Community

    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 …

  • Bob Garfield & Weschler consider E M Forster’s 1909 story, “The Machine Stops.”

    Bob Garfield & Weschler consider E M Forster’s 1909 story, “The Machine Stops.”

    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. Zoom, as it were, avant la lettre.

  • An Architectonic Technological Sublimity

    An Architectonic Technological Sublimity

    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.

  • Terry Riley: Stories From A Life In Music

    Terry Riley: Stories From A Life In Music

    An incredibly rare, personal and insightful dialogue with composer/performer Terry Riley from the Creative Music Online program in August 2021 including stories about Riley's connections with Indian music guru Pandit Pran Nath and composers John Cage and La Monte Young as well as an in depth discussion about how Riley created his seminal work "In C”. Moderated by Riley’s long-time friend and student, program director, Michael Harrison, with questions from participating composers.

  • Chilean novelist Benjamin Labatut on his latest novel When We Cease to Understand the World

    Chilean novelist Benjamin Labatut on his latest novel When We Cease to Understand the World

    In collaboration with the Community Bookstore of Brooklyn. “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.

  • Ian Woo: Shifting Planes (on abstraction, counterpoint and drawing)

    Ian Woo: Shifting Planes (on abstraction, counterpoint and drawing)

    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.

  • On the Historical Reality and Artistic Representation of Lynchings | Weschler & Ken Gonzales-Day

    On the Historical Reality and Artistic Representation of Lynchings | Weschler & Ken Gonzales-Day

    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.

  • Jay Lynn (formerly Ramiro) Gomez in conversation with Ren Weschler

    Jay Lynn (formerly Ramiro) Gomez in conversation with Ren Weschler

    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 …

  • LOOM•ROOM•HARP | Panel Discussion

    LOOM•ROOM•HARP | Panel Discussion

    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.

  • Visions of Clouds

    Visions of Clouds

    Arts Letters & Numbers is pleased to announce an hybrid event in collaboration with 'The Truant School' located in France, a Talk / Conversation on Education and Arts which will be held on Friday July 22 at noon EST. ALN founding director David Gersten will be speaking from the Barn at ALN with artist Alan Ruiz and the ‘The Truant School’ group.

  • Walter Murch | The Uncanny Mathematics Undergirding the Egyptian Pyramids

    Walter Murch | The Uncanny Mathematics Undergirding the Egyptian Pyramids

    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 …