A Philosophy Unlocks a Device's Magic

“If you know what you’re doing, you're not doing enough.”

This was a saying that came to me, that at first sounds paradoxical. But for me it was a way to understand that knowledge is not the limit of things, and that when you’re at your limits, the only knowledge you need is that you can go further. And to go further is an action, an action beyond knowledge where new, unforeseeable knowledge awaits. You will never get here by living inside the lines, but to go beyond them is not easier. It's in many ways harder, because you are entering territory without all the supports of the known, all the culture that keeps the open void from consuming us.

If you make something new, like say my company’s product the Demon Box for instance, it can’t actually be new unless there’s a philosophy that has to go along with it. In the case of the Demon Box, the instrument is just a physical manifestation of a bigger idea. It’s an idea in contrast to the idea that all the organizing principles we’ve hitherto devised are music, and all that is not part of that is noise. Additionally, it’s about the idea of the inverted pyramid, to invert all the previous concepts of music into a new theory that this would be the first intentionally designed instrument of a new symphony.

Once this idea is understood both intuitively and intellectually it can be applied via the industrial arts to something that evokes the ideas further, and allows a user to see the full potential of it. 

If you took the newest invention from 500 years from now and plopped it on the table in front of someone today, it wouldn’t matter, because without the instruction manual and the values of the society it was created in, its full potential would be locked within the device. 

No matter how hard you work, and no matter the validity of your work – there will be people who interpret it both correctly and incorrectly, both fully and only partially. There’s a whole spectrum of people out there, and you can’t expect everyone to be the same or think the same. 

Generally, when you’re doing something new, there will be people who are excited by it and there will be aggressive detractors. It's best if you want to do something new to prepare yourself early for the variety of people you’ll encounter because even the botched ideas of an aggressive critic can still hold within them the seeds of thinking differently.

It’s very important to understand that it’s the questions that don’t have answers that we must go back to over and again, that are perhaps the most important of all, like zen koans. The inverted pyramid falls into this. “How do you stand the pyramid of Giza upside down?”  Well, if you stand back and realize celestial body gravity is a minority force in the universe, you may realize it is already upside down. But this is just one way to answer it. Perhaps you could levitate it using a gigantic magnet, or rotate it within a super massive MRI machine. The point is the pursuit of the impossible allows you to exhaust your reason and perhaps actually find solutions that exist just beyond each of our individual reasonings. Exhaustion is an important force in the universe and my life. When I am exhausted, there’s a part of me that is veiled and hidden; when I am well rested comes into view and lives close to the surface, ready to act. When I am exhausted, my mind and body work, but anything they do can be considered wanton because they reside in a surreal place where reason is lifted like lifting an obscuring veil from the face of a sculpture.