Ticking Stripe

Author: Spencer Gerhardt

Publisher: Blank Forms (2024)

Noted composer and mathematician Spencer Gerhardt presents Ticking Stripe, a groundbreaking collection of essays linking notions of continuity and construction across the boundaries of math, art, music, and philosophy. Gerhardt offers new, and deeply informed interpretations of musical minimalism and the 1960s avant-garde, viewed through the lens of trailblazing artists such as La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Catherine Christer Hennix, Henry Flynt, and Tony Conrad.

Ticking Stripe pairs the spirit of L. E. J. Brouwer—a mathematician who brilliantly, and controversially, sought to reconstruct the continuum in his own philosophical terms called intuitionism—with the ambitions of pioneering minimalists who combined continued constructions, idealized processes of introspection, and conceptual world-building with a host of philosophical, scientific, and spiritual concerns. Informed by his own work as a professional mathematician and composer, Gerhardt explores the depths of these disparate traditions, finding unlikely areas of commonality. Spanning more than two decades, these essays feature rich historical explorations of minimalist music, writing on contemporary art, and work in logic and algebra, all approached with clarity and technical aplomb.