The third in our 2005 lecture series
entitled Figuring Minds

Thursday, June 30 @ 6:30pm
The Logic Alphabet
by Christine Wertheim [IFF-L8]

apexart [more]
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013
Admission Free

In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic. From a basement in Ohio, guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger developed a visual system - called the “Logic Alphabet” - in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns underpinning logic. During the 1970’s Zellweger built a series of physical models of his alphabet that recall the educational “gifts” of Friedrich Froebel. Just as Froebel was influenced by the study of crystal structures, which he believed could serve as the foundation for an entire educational framework, so Zellweger’s Logic Alphabet is based on a crystal-like arrangement of its elements. Where the traditional approach to logic is purely abstract, Zellweger’s is geometric, making it amenable to visual play.

These days we accept outsider artists, and are perhaps aware of outsider scientists, but Zellweger may be the first we could define as an outsider logician. After half a century of obscurity, his idiosyncratic approach is starting to attract the attention of mathematicians who believe it offers a new perspective on logic. Christine Wertheim, co-director of the Institute For Figuring, has been studying Zellweger’s work for the past five years and will present a talk about his program on Thursday June 30 at Apexart.

Originally a painter, Christine Wertheim has a doctorate in philosophy and literature from Middlesex University in London. From 1993 to 2001 she taught critical theory and studio practice in London at the Architectural Association, the Slade School of Fine Art and Goldsmith’s College at the University of London. In late 2001 Christine moved to Los Angeles to join the Critical Studies department at the California Institute of the Arts, where she teaches writing, literature, feminism and critical theory. In 2004, she organized the Séance conference on the conditions of language and narrative in contemporary writing at the Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater (REDCAT). A book of the conference is forthcoming from Make Now Press. Christine is currently working on a book about the relations between subjectivity, language and topology in Western poetics.
A conversation between Wertheim and Zellweger will be featured in Cabinet Issue #18 (on the newsstands in July 2005)