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Jan 28th, 2020
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  1. “Who designed your logo, as seen on your website and passes? What drew you to it?”
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  4. Well, I designed it. I drew it. It’s a six-foot piece of art. It’s square. It was made in four pieces, like the labyrinth that I described. It’s layered. It is about a foot thick, and it is made out of quarter-inch layers of foam core. Foam core is a layer of Styrofoam with a layer of paper on each side. It’s often used as backing for prints and so forth, or framed artworks. I decided back in the 1980s that I was going to make foam core sculptures that were half sculpture and half painting. I made half a dozen of them before I ended up doing other things. One of the things that I made back then was this sculpture that I called The Meaning of Music.
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  7. I was really interested in music at that point, partly because I was trying to sort out the phenomenology of meaning, which is, “what is meaning? Is it something real? If it’s something real, what does it represent, or what is it?” All of that. One of the things I had noticed was that people found music intrinsically meaningful. That was very interesting to me, because even nihilistic people couldn’t help but find music meaningful. It was 1983 or 1984. The punk rock movement was still pretty powerful, still a going concern. I actually liked the Sex Pistols quite a bit. I notice that even the nihilistic punk rock types found their nihilistic punk rock extremely meaningful, which I thought was extremely comically: at the same time, they were celebrating their anarchic nihilism, they were really into their music.
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  10. Music goes underneath thinking because it’s an art form. It’s also a good antidote to rational scepticism, which is why music has become such a powerful force in our culture. People love music. I think that, without music, many people would just die. It’s because music speaks of meaning directly. When you listen to music, when you are into it and enjoying it, you are not really enjoying it: you are finding the experience meaningful. It’s fun to watch people play music, because they entrain themselves. It’s really good to watch people improvise. They are all entrained together, doing this novel thing. They are out on the edge, where they should be. They are doing it beautifully.
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  13. So, I thought a lot about what music represented, and I spent about four months making this painting. I thought I would try to make a piece of art that visually represented what music represented in the auditory realm. And so, if you look at that logo, you will see that it’s like a Necker cube. A Necker cube is one of those reversing cubes. I made the painting so that you could not resolve it visually. If you look at it, if you kind of gaze at it without focusing too much, you will see that it moves and moves and moves, as your brain tries to resolve what it is. It is actually a cube set on end, with a tunnel down the middle of it broken into four fragments. It is also a three-dimensional representation of a two-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional object. Music is a four-dimensional object, right? It has three spatial dimensions, because music is arrayed in space. That’s what happens when you listen to stereo. You can see, feel, or hear how it is arrayed in space, and then it unfolds across time. So, it has four dimensions.
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  16. The reason music is meaningful—and this took me an awful long time to figure out—is because the things that you see in the world that you think are objects are not objects. They are actually patterns. They are patterns that you interact with in a manner that makes them into tools. You are a pattern, because you maintain your structure across time. That’s a pattern. A pattern is something that maintains its structure across time. And so, all the things that we perceive are patterns.
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  19. Think of all the patterns you are made out of it. You can go down to the sub-atomic level, and there is an array of patterns. Above that, at the atomic level, there is another array of patterns. At the molecular level, there is another array of patterns. Then your organs are patterns. Then there is you that is a pattern. Then there is you moving through space, with all these other people, and that’s a pattern. Then there is the town that you are in: that’s a pattern. The political system you are in: that’s a pattern. The ecological system: that’s a pattern. There is the cosmos itself, and that’s a pattern. That’s the harmony of the spheres.
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  23. All those patterns are interacting in a harmonious way. That’s what music represents: the harmonious interaction of the patterns of the world. Then, when you go out to a bar and dance, you are arraying your body along with that pattern. You find that deeply meaningful, like you should, because you should array your body in alignment with the patterns of the world. Then, when you dance with someone else, and maybe that is someone you love, you mutually produce a pattern, and you are improvising with each other to produce that pattern. You are simultaneously aligning the pattern that you are both producing, with all the patterned reality of the music. So, you are acting out engaging in a dialog—which is diálogos, right? So, you are engaging in a dialog that produces a pattern that adapts you to the structure of the patterns of the word. That’s what you are doing, when you are dancing.
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  26. I figured all that out, with regards to music, and tried to portray it in that logo and symbol. Since then, I have been experimenting with that symbol, trying to see how many different forms I can get it to manifest in the world. It’s propagating like mad. That was part of what I wanted to do, when I made it thirty-five years ago. I thought, “I’ll make this thing and see how many different ways it will manifest itself in the world.” So, that’s the story of that logo.
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