Artists, Writers & Scientists Share their Stories
Ada Limón, Max Richter, Dustin O’Halloran, David George Haskell, Donald Hoffman, and Ralph Gibson, reflect on beauty and the memories that give their life meaning.
24th US Poet Laureate ADA LIMÓN
Author of Startlement · Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry · The Hurting Kind
It’s always very interesting that we have to make a case for art because we don’t have to make a case for fast food. Like, we don’t have to make a case for all of these sort of things in our lives that we do not need, and yet we have to make a case for beauty? We have to make a case for the soul? We have to make a case for humanity? We have to make a case for singing back the wounded world? That to me is fascinating.
Celebrating the Performing Arts with Chief Artistic Officer SHANTA THAKE
Lincoln Center is multiple stages. I think probably over three dozen stages across 16 acres. It is a vast canvas in and of itself. And then we have this beautiful plaza that leads to this beautiful campus, and that’s the visual I think that most people have when they think of Lincoln Center is this beautiful fountain in the center and these three gorgeous buildings.It’s New York’s biggest plaza, and it feels very vibrant and beautiful. In the summer, we really take that plaza and we transform it into a dance floor. So this idea of also interrupting what people’s notion of Lincoln Center is because it’s a space that is very aspirational, which is a great thing.
GEORGI GOSPODINOV (Author of Time Shelter · Death and the Gardener · The Physics of Sorrow) ANGELA RODEL (Translator · Musician · Exec. Director · Fulbright Bulgaria)
We are in the middle of a labyrinth which suggests to us many fake corridors. What's the superpower of literature? Literature is like an antidote against propaganda. Propaganda explains the world easily in a two-dimensional way. Literature gives you a more complex explanation. Literature tells personal stories.
Artists on Creativity · Improvisation & the Search for Meaning
Peter Weller, Chayse Irvin, Lee Jaffe, Eric Fischl, Adam Moss, Anthony White, Dickie Landry, Bruce Evan Barnhart, Benh Zeitlin, Richard Sennett, Donald Sultan, Gloria Pacis, Paul Levinson and Julio Ottino share their stories.
NACHO DE GREGORIO · Author of TheWhiteBox
I'm a believer in this technology. I believe that the cheaper it is, the more people will use it. So, even if we assume that models will get smaller for the same level of intelligence, the demand to actually have more compute is going to be enormous. And the reason why you want to have the compute close to you is not only in terms of performance. As a national security threat, I'm not saying this will happen, but it could happen that China or US or whoever decides to stop exporting compute to the rest of the world. If that happens today, Europe has zero AI at the scale of data the data center.
Epidemiologist · Musician · Author of Our Wild Familiars
So synanthropes are animals that have adapted to human-modified environments, and the Greek translation essentially is together with humans, so synanthrope. And they're a fascinating subset of wild animals that they're all around us, but we don't really notice them. And so in this new book, I was excited about writing something that had to do with the natural world. I was excited about writing something that touched on climate change and the way that the world was changing, but maybe not with such a sort of dirgey approach or funereal approach. Something that actually explored the wonder of the world as it is and as we experience it around our communities in our cities and towns. And I had come across this word synanthrope in the research for my last book, The Invisible Siege, which was about the rise of coronaviruses and the long scientific journey to find cures for COVID-19, and it just kind of stuck with me. There is this connection, of course, between wild animals and viruses and lots of questions about the origin of SARS-2, the virus that spread COVID-19 and caused the pandemic. And while that's touched on in the book a little bit, the vast majority of what I was excited to write about was just what these animals are doing in our cities. How is it that wild animals, raccoons, coyotes, all kinds of birds and animals as fragile as bats… These are not just insects and earthworms and things like that. These are very large predators that have nevertheless found a way to survive among us. And that in and of itself I think is just an amazing story and what I explore in this book.
It is an ordinary human impulse to find a reflection of ourselves in the machines we build. But what happens when the lifeless begins to talk back, to paint, to compose and to simulate our emotions? How do we hold on to what makes us human? Siri Hustvedt, C. Thi Nguyen, Bayo Akomolafe, Jonathan Yeo, Laura Eason, Max Richter, Ralph Gibson, Catherine Curtin, Liad Mudrik, Jacob Ward, Chris Dercon examine the power of imperfection, imagination, intuition, and how to avoid getting lost in the machine.
AMITAV GHOSH · Author of Ghost-Eye · The Shadow Lines · The Hungry Tide · Sea of Poppies · The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Imagining with precision is a very fundamental part of my work. When I sit down to write about anything, whether it be The Hungry Tide in the Sundarbans, or let's say The Shadow Lines, or Ghost-Eye. It's very important for me to get the topography right, to get the outlay of the streets or the house exactly right so I can actually picture all of that in my head. It's very important for me to have a sort of pictorial sense of what I'm seeing and what I'm writing about. Before I can write about it, I need to see it, as it were. So that's absolutely fundamental to my craft. That's just how I go about it. Like the Sufis say—behind the apparent reality is a hidden or ba- reality.
I guess that's always been something of great interest to me. How do you square these two realities and make them come together on a page? And really that is what, in some sense, the work of the imagination is. We know that we're in the grip of an intensifying planetary crisis. We can see signs of it everywhere.
How much of our consciousness is actually shaped by our bodies? We explore embodied cognition and the idea that we think with our limbs, breath and physical interactions, with Siri Hustvedt, Guy Leschziner, Daisy Fancourt, Helen Whybrow, Marie Nipper, Arash Abizadeh, David Linden, Bayo Akomolafe, Master Shi Heng Yi, Anil Seth, Robert Waldinger, Noelani Pantastico and Sean Curran.
Redesigning Our Relationship with Nature
We explore our changing planet, from melting ice in Greenland to the depleted soils in our farmlands. We’re joined by writers, advocates and visionaries to discuss environmental justice and the circular economy. Abrahm Lustgarten, Jon Gertner, Rebecca Tickell, Bill Hare, Rob Nixon, Euan Nisbet, Roland Geyer, William McDonough, Carlo Ratti, Jason deCaires Taylor, Jane Madgwick, Paul Shrivastava, Liza Featherstone, Osprey Orielle Lake, Ron Gonen, Louis de Jaeger, Kathleen Rogers and Yolanda Kakabadse.
Journalists, Writers, Political Scientists, Economists, Filmmakers on Democracy & The Fight for Truth · We explore the collapse of journalism, the rise of spin dictators and how disinformation is the new censorship. As media consolidates, journalism remains an act of hope. Nicholas Kristof, Abrahm Lustgarten, Lee McIntyre, Richard Black, Richard Wolff, Jeffrey Rosen, Sergei Guriev, James Fishkin, Viet Thanh Nguyen, T.C. Boyle, George Pelecanos, Jacob Ward, Dean Spade, Debora Cahn, Daniel Susskind, Mike Davis, Michael Maren.
DR. KEITH SAWYER · Author of Learning to See: Inside the World's Leading Art and Design Schools · Explaining Creativity · Group Genius
I've discovered in my studies of creativity in general that creativity is not about starting with a brilliant idea and then following a linear path to an execution of your idea. What I see in art and design is a much more iterative, wandering, exploratory process where the ideas emerge from the act of engaging in the work.
Architect · Engineer CARLO RATTI
Director of MIT's Senseable City Lab
Curator of Venice Biennale’s 19th Int’l Architectural Exhibition
What we need to do is learn from nature. If you think about how nature progresses through trial and error. I'm really a fan of how we can do open designs that citizens can respond to, and use the feedback in order to create similar systems to what happens in nature.
QUINN SLOBODIAN & BEN TARNOFF on why understanding Elon Musk’s computational worldview is essential for protecting the public sphere and fighting back against cyborg conservatism
Musk interestingly has this way of excluding the majority of the population from consideration, what he variously calls non-playing characters or NPCs, which is a category from video games, or sometimes bots, vampires. And this is a much more stark version of insider and outsider group creation than even hierarchies of race because it takes this one step further by taking very seriously the idea that other people are not only not human, but they in some way don't even exist, which is the literal reading of Musk's adoption of Nick Bostrom's simulation theory, which is that most people are simply programmable parts of a simulation, and only a small number of people are actual players.
As artificial intelligence reshapes our visual culture and cognitive habits, we investigate the profound costs of offloading our reason to algorithms with Trevor Paglen, Jaron Lanier, Henry Ajder, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Antonella Wilby, C. Thi Nguyen, Carl Safina, Jeffrey Sachs, Etgar Keret, April Gornik and Iain McGilchrist.
Author SIRI HUSTVEDT Remembers Her Late Husband, PAUL AUSTER
Grief happens because you don't stop loving the person who died. The person doesn't exist in your reality anymore. The everyday is not colored and shaped by this other human being, but you don't stop loving the person. So grief is a particular kind of unrequited love. And probably without that dynamic relationship with this person, I would be someone else. And he would've been someone else. Paul died before me. But we were, I think, hugely important to the drama of becoming in our own lives.
Architects SALWA & SELMA MIKOU
Architecture should bring a true sensation of wellbeing. We were really lucky to experience that as children, and now as architects, we try to bring all that we learned into our practice.
Creativity is an infinite conversation. The impulse to speak and be heard is what keeps us tethered to each other and to the world. Max Richter, Andre Dubus III, Iain McGilchrist, Ana Castillo, Albert Serra, Daisy Fancourt, David George Haskell, C. Thi Nguyen, Cherien Dabis, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ami Vitale, April Gornik, Carter Burwell, Hala Alyan, Jericho Brown and Hans Ulrich Obrist explore creativity as a window into reality and a tool for connection.
We hear from Andre Dubus III, Etgar Keret, Paul Lynch, Megan Abbott, Katie Kitamura, Liz Moore, A.L. Kennedy, Siri Hustvedt, Yann Martel, Intan Paramaditha, T.C. Boyle and Ada Limón on finding beauty in chaos and how writing helps them make sense of the world.
The Creative Process: Podcast Interviews & Portraits of the World’s Leading Authors & Creative Thinkers
Inspiring Students – Encouraging Reading - Connecting through Stories
The Creative Process exhibition is traveling to universities and museums. The Creative Process exhibition consists of interviews with over 100 esteemed writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Faber, T.C. Boyle, Jay McInerney, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Etgar Keret, Douglas Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Yiyun Li, among others. Artist and interviewer: Mia Funk.
