Christine Wertheim is a faculty member of the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts where she teaches writing, literature, and critical theory. Her most recent articles on art and aesthetics have appeared in X-tra and in Art Seminar, an anthology forthcoming from Routledge. In 2004, she organized “Séance,” a two-day conference at REDCAT on the conditions of language and narrative in contemporary writing. She is co-director of the Institute For Figuring.
In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic. From a basement in Ohio, guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger developed an extraordinary visual system—called the “Logic Alphabet”—in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometric patterns underpinning logic.