The Natural Philosopher

Hi, my name is Rod Smith and I have an education/cognitive art project called "The Natural Philosopher". After a very frustrating career as a mechanical engineer, I began to look around for a model for technology that might actually work...and of course...I turned to Nature. What I didn't realize at the time, was that what I was really looking for was a new epistemology...a new theory of knowledge, itself. I was fortunate in the mid-90's to discover the work of British anthropologist and cyberneticist, Gregory Bateson. In his books, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind," and "Mind & Nature: A Necessary Unity" Bateson develops an ECOLOGICAL epistemology and that works all day long for me. Bateson suggests that in order to address the monolithic problems of modern Western culture, we must first correct a deeply flawed cultural epistemology or we get nowhere. My project is an experiment with just such an effort. As the Taoists say, always direct your energy where the least bit of effort does you the most good. While working as an engineer, I'd become fascinated with the communication potential of blueprint drawings and that combination of text and image became my medium. Over time they "devolved" into a modern version of the medieval illuminated manuscript. I really don't like to call my pieces "posters" because I don't like the connotations of that word. For my own purposes, I think of them as non-linear communication media...the next logical step after the (linear) codex form (books). And as we know, "The medium is the message." I've been designing these pieces for years and they cover a variety of subjects from a Batesonian/Glass Bead Game epistemography, to music theory and method, to learning and creativity, physics, architecture and mathematics and a series of epistemological parables. These have been black and white, handcolored pieces up until now. Many of these hang in the Music and Media Technologies Department at Trinity College Dublin and reside in the collection of the library of Les Compagnons du Devoir in Paris. Handcolored pieces of my work are also in the possession of Rolling Stone guitarist, Ronnie Wood; novelist Tom Robbins; and math and science writer, Ian Stewart. I've recently published my first full color print, MUSIC 201: VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF WESTERN MUSICAL STRUCTURE and it's available at my website http://www.naturalphilosopher.org My latest focus with the performance end of my work is a piece I call "Music as an Ecological Model." I designed a custom music instruction instrument I call The Harmonochord(TM) that I use for these shows. There are more details in various blog entries above and I'll have more content on my website soon...a lot more! Thanks!