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eohippus all contents copyright 2007 max carmichael | why eohippus? bio contact | |
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arts portfolio: visual arts music writing events design | |
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writing: philosophy & theory | back next | |
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Context & Inspiration 1971-present I started delving into the meaning of life in childhood, discovering Nietzsche in high school. I had the usual hormone-driven adolescent questions and mystical bent. I never really understood the boundaries between art, science, life, spirituality, and theory. They all seemed fair game. After taking core courses in the history of western philosophy, I ended my freshman year at the University of Chicago with an independent ethnographic study, which came to be known to my friends and family simply as "The Project". Then I met Bruce Lacy, an intense philosophy student and fellow small-town Midwesterner, who introduced me to the cults of both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard McKeon, the notorious professor described as "The Chairman" in Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", which is responsible for introducing the word "paradigm" to popular culture, was an early influence. At Illinois Institute of Technology I embarked on a private study of the phenomenon of intuitive discoveries in science, which was originated by the mathematician Poincare, and recently picked up by clinical psychologists, with whom I corresponded. I was almost more interested in how and why people had theories, than in the theories themselves. I also discovered the work of Korzybski and the spinoff legacy of operational philosophy, led by Anatol Rapaport in Canada. At Stanford, I took graduate courses and seminars in philosophy of language and multi-valued truth theory, reveling in the ethnographic dimension of Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations". Within a few years, after my immersion in the arts revolution at CalArts and punk-dominated San Francisco, I designed a "philosophical" performance piece called "Senility Test", which foreshadowed Sandy Stone's performance at the Chance Conference sixteen years later. At Stanford I met Jack Alpert, a cognitive scientist with whom I've maintained a dialog ever since. Jack has reinforced my interest in temporal phenomena, illustrative parables, and "mental models". Then I met Jon Spayde, writer and cultural interpreter who introduced me to the work of Levi-Strauss and the concepts of "savage thought", the bricoleur, and "anthropologizing", which have helped me understand a lot of things. Our Terra Incognita Pow-Wows had a strong philosophical component reflecting the sophistication and depth of our community. I was continuing to seek out insights into nature, society, and cognition, and in the context of my studies of indigenous desert cultures, I came to visualize a "cultural complex" of storytelling, songs, and "landscape art" as an integral part of a migratory subsistence lifeway. This was as far as I'd gotten when I busted into the world of digital media and met Peter Lunenfeld, professor at Art Center College of Design and founder of "mediawork" and the "Digital Dialectic". Peter and his friends opened a new, incredibly diverse, generous, and egalitarian world of discourse on art, media, environment, and society. |
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