Ticking Stripe
By Spencer Gerhardt

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Noted mathematician and composer 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, deeply informed analysis of the 1960s New York 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 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 mathematician and composer, Gerhardt explores the depths of these disparate traditions, finding unlikely areas of commonality.

Spencer Gerhardt is a composer and mathematician. His music engages constructive, introspective, and romantic traditions. For more than twenty years, Gerhardt has written solo piano music, piano-based songs, and works of minimalism. He studied raga with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, piano performance with Sung-Hwa Park, and has collaborated with artists such as Thomas Ankersmit and Charles Curtis. Gerhardt has a record forthcoming on Blank Forms Editions. Gerhardt is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Mathematics at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on algebraic groups, often viewed in connection with problems in finite group theory and representation theory. Prior to his work in algebra, he studied logic and philosophy in the Brouwerian tradition at the University of Amsterdam, where he received a Master of Science. Gerhardt has written about art and music in this context, in particular the philosophical underpinnings of minimalism.

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Philip Ording is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Science at the Pratt Institute. In addition to teaching mathematics at Columbia University, the City University of New York, and Sarah Lawrence College, he has worked as a consultant in art and design studios throughout New York since 2003. He is author of the award-winning book 99 Variations on a Proof (Princeton, 2019) and coeditor of Simplicity: Ideals of Practice in Mathematics and the Arts (Springer, 2017). His research and writing appear in the American Journal of Mathematics, Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications, Cabinet, Bulletins of the Serving Library, American Mathematical Society History of Mathematics series, and elsewhere.

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Kate and Laura Mulleavy co-founded the fashion label Rodarte in 2005, subsequently infusing their distinctive visual language and approach to storytelling into areas such as film and opera costume design, writing, and film directing. Their designs reside in the permanent collections of museums nationwide, including the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum at FIT in New York. Institutional exhibitions include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011), and a retrospective at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (2018). In 2017, the Mulleavys wrote and directed their first feature film, Woodshock, starring Kirsten Dunst. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and was distributed by a24. They are currently at work on their second film.

Blank Forms Editions
Paperback, 6 x 9.25 in. / 252 pgs / 5 bw.