On December 9th, nearly 40 RISD Architecture students presented ‘Galapagos In C’: an interactive, multimedia performance combining architecture, performance, and music. 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 two collaborative architecture studios co-taught by architect/director David Gersten and composer/musician Michael Harrison. This is a first-of-its-kind project held at RISD. 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. About the Galapagos Project The idea of “Galapagos in C” was conceived as part of the ongoing “Galapagos Project,” an archipelago of works initiated last year through Arts Letters & Numbers. The global initiative aims to promote collaboration, foster creative alliance, and advocate for greater empathy, compassion, and ethics in developing new spaces for education and new forms of knowledge. Recognizing cultural diversity as a range of ways of knowing, this project proposes a new vision of education: a Galapagos of forms of knowledge with intellectual force and capacity to make significant contributions towards creating a better world.