THE LOGIC ALPHABET OF SHEA ZELLWEGER

At the MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY

Curated by IFF co-director Christine Wertheim

This exhibition was shown from March 3, 2007 to March 1, 2012.

Opening Reception: Saturday March 3 2007,  7pm
@ Museum of Jurassic Technology
9341 Venice Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232

Lecture: Saturday March 3 2007 @ 5pm
Join exhibit curator Christine Wertheim and IFF director Margaret Wertheim
for a discussion about logic and a conversation with Dr. Shea Zellweger
@ Foshay Masonic Lodge
9635 Venice Blvd (2 Blocks West of the MJT)

In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, Shea Zellweger began a journey that would culminate in a radical new notation for formal logic, the set of relations that underlies modern computing. From a garage in Ohio, Zellweger developed a visual language he dubbed the “Logic Alphabet,” in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes are maneuvered like puzzles to reveal the geometric patterns hidden beneath the symbolic web of logic. For more than fifty years, Zellweger has been exploring the symmetries and relations inherent in these patterns, which he has made manifest in a series of delicately crafted wooden models and in thousands of pages of diagrams. In this jewel-box exhibit, the Institute For Figuring and the Museum of Jurassic Technology proudly present Dr Shea Zellweger’s Logic Alphabet models and drawings.

The Logic Alphabet Tesseract – a four-dimensional cube. Diagrams by Warren Tschantz.

Zellweger’s work is based on a discovery that the logic on which our computers run is allied with a geometric structure whose form is a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube.  Much of his research over the past half century has aimed at identifying all the subsets of this group of relations in one, two, and three dimensions. The resulting models and diagrams, often crystalline in nature, constitute a genuine research project in logic while simultaneously passing through distinct aesthetic phases,
 reminiscent of Russian Constructivism, concrete poetry and Pop Art. What is most important here is that these physical models enable us manipulate logical symbols spatially – we may learn to do logic by flipping and rotating these marvelous toys.

Left: The Logical Garnet, three dimensional projection of the Logic Alphabet tesseract. Right: A cubic sub-group of the Logical Garnet.

That logic is underpinned by a spatial architecture was independently discovered at least six times in the history of mathematics, first by C.S. Pierce, one of  the pioneers of the field. For Zellweger this fact is of more than purely formal significance - it is the seed of a potential pedagogical revolution. Through model play, he proposes, we may teach our infants logic in school. Like the great nineteenth century creator of the kindergarten system of education, Friedrich Froebel - himself an experienced crystallographer - Zellweger’s models call forth the latent potentiality of the mind through engagement of both the eyes and hands. This revolution would not be confined to the schoolroom, for given that logic is the foundation of computing, the alphabet might serve to re-envision the computer itself.

On Saturday March 3, please join exhibit curator Christine Wertheim and IFF Director Margaret Wertheim in a conversation with Dr Shea Zellweger  at the Foshay Masonic Lodge in Culver City (2 blocks west of the MJT). The event will be followed by a reception at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, where the exhibit is on display.

$15 general admission to Conversation and Reception
$12  IFF + MJT members, students, seniors

The Logic Alphabet is on view at the Museum of Jurassic Technology
Thursday through Sunday 12noon – 6pm.

This exhibition was assisted by grants from the Annenberg Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

For more information on the Logic Alphabet see here [LINK]

For the IFF interview with Shea Zelleweger [LINK]