Tuesday is the collision this week. A soldering class, a mentalism set and an argument about octopus consciousness all begin within ninety minutes of each other on October 13, and I would choose by how much you want something put in your hands. The weekend belongs to East Williamsburg, where a three-weekend art crawl starts giving out tarot cards on Saturday the 10th.
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Galleries, studios and shops along an East Williamsburg route hand out custom tarot cards from the Major Arcana, one designed by an artist for each business and free to the first seventy-five people at every stop. You collect a stamp toward a raffle at each location and solve a riddle toward a treasure chest. It is free and it is the first of three weekends, each carrying a third of the deck, so I would start on Saturday.
Sat–Sun Oct 10–11 -
Umwelt is the term for the slice of the world an organism can perceive at all, which makes the octopus the right animal to build an evening around. Levin brings the comparative psychologist Alex Schnell and the molecular biologist Caroline Albertin to come at cephalopod cognition from the field and from the genome. Dwarf cuttlefish demonstrate camouflage live, the night carries on into DJs and stargazing, and it is free with an RSVP.
Tue Oct 13, 8p -
James talks with Colin Channer about The Disappearers, which is on this year's Booker shortlist and whose winner is not announced until November. The novel opens in Kingston in 1988 with eight men, strangers to each other, beginning rehearsals for a play and sharing one fact none of them can say out loud. A book signing follows, and Christopher Udemezue, who records as Neon Christina, closes the afternoon with a DJ set toasting queer Jamaica. It sits inside Second Sundays, so the building is open from noon and the whole thing is free with an RSVP.
Sun Oct 11, 4–6p -
The class teaches soldering from the iron up, through-hole technique, desoldering, and the mistakes everyone makes first. What you take home is Conway's Game of Life as an LED tile, thirty-eight components running a cellular automaton as an animated pattern, and I like that the thing you leave with computes something rather than blinking. No experience is needed and the tools are provided, though the optional case that turns it into the Saturday Night Fever dance floor costs eighteen dollars.
Tue Oct 13, 6–9p, doors 5:45p -
Index pairs a multi-course run of baked goods with the teas and the poems that inspired them, which is a more deliberate idea than a reading with refreshments. The space holds two floors on Manhattan Avenue and programmes everything from creative coding to rooftop listening sessions. I have never written about Index before and that is most of why it is on the list.
Sun Oct 11, 2–5p -
Benny Soto brings 718 Sessions back to Greenpoint for its holiday party, with Krivit in the main room and That Matt in the Bad Room. Krivit is a long-running New York selector and the night is built around a catalogue rather than a release. The Monday is a holiday, which is the only reason a Sunday that ends around two in the morning works, and five dollars covers the first hundred people through the door before seven.
Sun Oct 11, 6p–2a -
Baum brings magic and mentalism to the mead hall on Scott Avenue, and the roman numeral in the title tells you this is the fourth time. Honey's is a small room and mentalism needs a small room, which is most of the argument for giving up a Tuesday night to it.
Tue Oct 13, doors 7p, show 7:30p -
The hackerspace opens its floor twice a week to anyone who turns up with something to work on, and the range runs from costumes through electronics to woodworking. There is no project you are supposed to be building and no class you have to book. It is eighteen and over.
Thu Oct 8 and Mon Oct 12, 6:30–9:30p -
Bead setting lifts tiny grains of metal straight off the surface with a graver and uses them to hold a stone, so the setting is raised out of the material rather than added to it. Jivetin takes between four and twelve people through layout geometry, micro-drilling and engraving control in one day, and you leave with finished samples. It assumes you have done flush setting before.
Fri Oct 9, 11a–6p -
Form Together brings a group of Buffalo artists to Greenpoint with work that puts the human figure on surfaces that are not rectangles. Mass runs his own solo show, Further Observation, on a separate floor, so the building holds two exhibitions at once.
Fri Oct 9
A83 and Barkow Leibinger curate this with PIN-UP, and the brief is a single object answered by dozens of architects and designers, among them Konstantin Grcic, Herzog & de Meuron, Johnston Marklee, Aranda\Lasch and Jonathan Olivares. One brief in many hands is the cleanest format there is for an audience that argues about chairs. The opening has passed, so treat this as somewhere to go and look rather than a night out.
Shayna Strype works in animation, sculpture and puppetry performance, and her films have screened at Slamdance, Ann Arbor, Anthology Film Archives, the CCCB in Barcelona and Hiroshima Animation Season. Her work has been supported by the Jim Henson Foundation, Mono No Aware, The Mercury Store, Mass MoCA's Assets for Artists program and the SVA Art Practice residency, and she is a 2026 MacDowell Fellow. With the photographer and bookmaker Dane Manary she has built Every Angel Is Terrifying at The Boiler, their first installation-based collaboration, in which kinetic sculptures are driven by projected animation and by Pepper's Ghost, the Victorian stage illusion, scaled up from the logic of paper dollhouses into a room you walk through. The title comes from Rilke's Duino Elegies, where the angel stands for something too large to look at directly. The reception is Friday the 9th from six and the show runs to October 24, and I would go on the opening night rather than later, because the work is kinetic and the room will be running.
See you out there,
Sam