David Gersten
Distinguished Professor Adjunct
David Gersten is an internationally recognized artist, architect, writer, and educator based in New York City. He is Distinguished Professor (adjunct) and Director of Interdisciplinary Learning at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where he has taught since 1991 and has served as Associate Dean under Dean John Hejduk and Acting Dean of the School. Gersten is the Founding Director and President of Arts Letters & Numbers, a non-profit arts and education organization dedicated to expanding the experiences understood as education through creating new structures and spaces for creative exchange across a wide range of disciplines and ways of knowing, including Architecture, Design, Fine Arts, Theater Arts, Film, Music, Crafts, Trades, the Humanities, the Sciences and Social Sciences. Arts, Letters & Numbers conducts studios and workshops in educational and cultural institutions worldwide, while operating an ongoing series of programs: workshops, residencies, studio programs, youth and mentorship programs, lectures, theater performances, exhibitions, events, music performances and films productions at its campus located in Averill Park, NY.
He works in collaboration with international organizations, educational and cultural institutions, and education policy groups on a wide range of subjects, including art / science / humanities collaborations, the United Nations SDG’s and the future of education. Gersten served on the Master planning / Strategic planning committees of the United Nations International School, where he was appointed by the Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations to serve as the ‘Lead Communicator’ for ‘A Vision of Education in the Twenty First Century’. Gersten co-directed a collaboration between UNICEF’s office of innovation and Arts Letters & Numbers to explore ‘Information Poverty: Scarcity in the age of Distributed Communications’ He recently presented a keynote address entitled “Unlocking the Creativity of Youth” at the UNICEF–EXPO and at the Chancellors Summit at CAFA in Beijing.
Gersten’s works, which include drawings, stories, essays, films, prints, performances, buildings, and constructions, have appeared in international exhibitions and performance spaces and are held in the collections of the Canadian Center for Architecture, the New York City Public Library’s print collection, and many private collections. Gersten recently was an official exhibitor, in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th and 18th Venice Architecture Biennale (2021 & 2023), where he directed and curated Arts Letters & Numbers exhibition titled: “SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” He is currently doing an Extraterrestrial Residency as part of Xu Bing Space Art Residency Program. This project is based on the first satellite of China's Star Chain of Arts Project, which was launched into LEO near-Earth on February 3, 2024, he is also serving at the Program Director for the 165 Celebration of the Cooper Union, curating an exhibition focused on Cooper Union’s history as a social political and educational project. Gersten has served as a visiting professor at Rhode Island School of Design, an International Visiting Scholar at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in Beijing, China, a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in the UK, a member of Education Reimagined’ working group and a is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Big Picture Learning, a network of over 200 high schools throughout the United States and the world.
View David Gersten's CV here.
Projects
Hunting Life: A Forever House
Making and Memory
Maturation
Structures
Films
Films
Having directed over a dozen films in the last 6 years, I have included here three short films as examples of this part of my practice.
Galapagos in C, 2015
‘Galapagos In C’: is an interactive, multimedia performance combining architecture, performance, and music in the RISD Museum. Terry Riley’s canonical 1964 piece “In C” was accompanied by Community MusicWorks alumni with composer and music scholar Stuart Isacoff of the Wall Street Journal, playing piano.The performance was the culminating gesture of a collaboration between architect/director David Gersten and composer / musician Michael Harrison.
This Film Captures the performance in a series of call and response duets, listening and speaking to the paintings within the RISD Museum’s Grand Gallery, the work created a conversation with the room, drawing out the paintings into the sounds of ‘In C’ using spoken word, sound installations, performative gestures, and projections.
Circling Towards a Disciplinary Chora, 2014
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. 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. ‘Circling Towards a Disciplinary Chora’ Captures the live performance of the same title.
Aarhus Arc, 2012
The 'Aarhus Arc' was built by 200 master students at the Aarhus School of Architecture. Performing as a wall, a drawing board/film screen, it divided the space, inviting people to whisper through it, draw through it, cut through it. Through these acts of empathy for those on the other side, the arc transformed into an architecture, a theater, a film, a drawing, a conversation, an action, a school, and a contribution to a city culminating in a series of performances of magical moments, smoke and fire. ‘Aarhus Arc’ captures the live performance of the same title.
Arts Letters and Numbers
Arts Letters and Numbers
Arts Letters & Numbers, is a 501(c) 3 non-profit: theater, film, education and publishing organization dedicated to creating new structures and spaces for creative exchange across a wide range of disciplines including: Architecture, Visual Arts, Theater Arts, Film, Music, Humanities, Sciences and Social Sciences. Working toward a new model of cultural creates new works in theater, music, film, performance, visual and literary arts.
Performances
Galapagos In C, 2015
‘Galapagos In C’: is an interactive, multimedia performance combining architecture, performance, and music in the RISD Museum. Terry Riley’s canonical 1964 piece “In C” was accompanied by Community Music-Works alumni with composer and music scholar Stuart Isacoff of the Wall Street Journal, playing piano. The performance was the culminating gesture of a collaboration between architect/director David Gersten and composer / musician Michael Harrison.
In a series of call and response duets, listening and speaking to the paintings within the RISD Museum’s Grand Gallery, the work created a conversation with the room, drawing out the paintings into the sounds of ‘In C’ using spoken word, sound installations, performative gestures, and projections.
Quotes from the Wall Street Journal Article
"Pulling it off was a serious challenge requiring discipline, a willingness to take risks, and real grit. The result was simply exhilarating.” "Interdisciplinarity is a popular buzzword on many campuses, but in most cases it remains a mere slogan. Here was a shining model for other schools—“
Galapagos Now, 2015
Inspired by the Galapagos Archipelago and the knowledge transformations that emerged from Darwin’s five-week experience within their dense bio-diversity, the Galapagos Now invokes the first principle of the theory of evolution. When individual agents are brought into proximity, they interact, building new linkages. Under the right circumstances, these symbioses create transformations, catalyzing new forms. The proximity and interactions within diverse agents is fundamental to the emergence of new logos, new species, new modes of being, the events of variety and variation; knowledge evolves, comprehension evolves, new forms emerge. The structure of this performance was situated between the collective embodied process of construction and the dynamic interactions of a wide range of disciplines understood as a living system.
Oppenheimer's Table, 2015
In spring 2015 a group of people from all over the world, and representing a wide spectrum of disciplines, convened to take part in “Oppenheimer’s Table” - the first in a series of Arts Letters & Numbers performance workshops examining and expanding upon the nature of 132 doodles generated from the secret joint committee meetings held in 1947 and chaired by Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The doodles, attributed variously to Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, I.I. Rabi, and other notable actors within the burgeoning cold war became the conceptual and formal foundation for the exploring of the complex history, culture, and possibilities that lay ahead in our contemporary nuclear age.
Circling Towards a Disciplinary Chora, 2014
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.
Exquisite Broken Circle; Suddenly a Chora, 2013
‘Exquisite Broken Circle; Suddenly a Chora’ was structured through six disciplines; construction, drawing, film/photography, writing, theater and music and was conceived of as a disciplinary exquisite corpse. We sought to build a bridge; a bridge that is a stage, a drawing board, a film screen, a story, a place to act—a bridge between many disciplines. This bridge was co-constructed, as each step in its construction developed as a series of shared questions across all of the disciplines. As we excavate the site, we ask: What is excavation in drawing? in film, in writing, in theater, in music. As we pour the foundations we ask what are foundations in drawing, in film, in writing, in theater, in music. As we raise the structure, we ask what is structure in drawing, in film, in writing, in theater, in music. As raise a new horizon, we ask; what is horizon in drawing, in film, in writing, in theater, in music?
Exquisite Broken Circle, 2012
"Exquisite Broken Circle" an Arts, Letters & Numbers workshop was held at Brown University. Conceived of as an embodied "exquisite corpse," participants from multidisciplinary backgrounds engage in action, reaction and reenactment within the construction of two half-circle arcs set back to back. Within each arc space of performance, a set of livefeed cameras and projections loop the image(s) and the performer(s) in an infinite mirror of responsive and repetitive movement that creates a dialogue between the performers and each set of actions.
Circles: Drawing on Friendship, 2012
“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.
Aarhus Arc, 2012
The 'Aarhus Arc' was built by 200 master students at the Aarhus School of Architecture. Performing as a wall, a drawing board/film screen, it divided the space, inviting people to whisper through it, draw through it, cut through it. Through these acts of empathy for those on the other side, the arc transformed into an architecture, a theater, a film, a drawing, a conversation, an action, a school, and a contribution to a city culminating in a series of performances of magical moments, smoke and fire.
Open Book, 2011
The 'Open Book' was an initial step towards what has become Arts Letters & Numbers. Directed by David Gersten. The performance explored the interrelations between gravity, bodies, drawing, time through inhabiting plans on floors, sections on walls, and the space in between.
