Philosophy INC Manifesto

When I was eleven years old there was a small creek that ran through the property behind our house in Virginia. I loved exploring that creek, finding old wires, broken glass, interesting rocks and rusty cans. I would take what I found and place the items on shelves formed by stones beneath a small wooden footbridge that crossed the creek. I remember thinking I was creating a museum and that people would come and visit and I would tell them about the items in the museum.

Exploring the world is a big part of childhood. The world is completely new and we want to understand what this place is about. Everyone has gone down to some body of water, gotten dirty, and looked at bugs, plants, trash and rocks. I’ve wondered about going back further than the creek museum in terms of a genesis of the primordial experience of exploring my surroundings and finding meaning in the things around me. But this episode was the first time I recall trying to put a name to and organize an activity that is similar to the activities I would engage in with Philosophy INC decades later.

I’m certain I get a lot of this kind of innate desire to organize subterranean debris from my mother. She loved to visit old trash sites in Florida and dig for bottles. Years and years after digging up a bottle somewhere in Florida, she would tell a story about the bottle, where she was and who was with her. And, for a long time, she supplemented the income of our family creating crafts made from found objects. She had a shrine in our house of the bottles she’d collected over the years.

There’s a magic found in exploring and revealing places, things, memories, feelings, histories. When it happens your world expands, the universe changes, you make connections to people and things. You speculate, your imagination clicks, knowledge builds and maybe continues to build. And what if we found ways to curate and illuminate the world that we uncovered as we moved through it? I think, at least to some degree, that is what Philosophy INC is - basically an attempt to illuminate interesting things in the world.

In the early days of Philosophy INC, when I put a name to what I was doing, one of my first activities was to explore Norfolk, Virginia by bicycle, learning about the city through its streets, edges, and forgotten spaces. I explored alleys, found trees growing out of the sides of buildings, documented my efforts and tried to learn how the city grew and changed. I discovered that a large portion of the city had been completely torn down during urban renewal in the 50s and 60s. So, this was a seed planted, exploring cities, getting familiar with them through personal exploration and research.

One thing I learned early in Norfolk was how deeply urban renewal had reshaped American cities. In Norfolk’s case, whole sections of the city had been torn down and rebuilt, leaving behind strange gaps, broken continuities, and traces of neighborhoods that no longer existed. I enjoyed the research, the digging, looking for clues, going out into the city trying to find lost spaces and seeing things with new eyes. I discovered that Benjamin Henry Latrobe, best known for his work on the U.S. Capitol, had built a home in Norfolk and that he had documented the instruments used in Congo Square, opening an unexpected connection between Norfolk’s architectural history and the deeper cultural history of American music.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m an intellectual. But I have dabbled a lot and found writers and thinkers that had a profound effect on my vision of the world. There was a summer 1991 issue of Anarcy: A Journal of Desire Armed that was my introduction to Guy Debord and the Situationists. At the time it just seemed exotic and strange - I was interested in it but didn’t really get it. But by the time I was in Norfolk and exploring I had developed a greater sense of some of the concepts and arguments. I was also introduced to Gilles Deleuze at the same time. So, I think at least some of the intellectual roots of Philosophy INC can be found in these two writers. Debord helped me understand how the spectacle separates us from the world and Deleuze helped me understand how capitalism drives us mad by constantly disrupting meaning. So exploring my city and trying to make some sense of it seemed like a logical response.

At some point in Norfolk I’d become comfortable with this combination of ideas and activities: Psychogeography, that something was wrong with capitalism, exploring, learning about where you live, and making new connections. By the time I had arrived in Orlando, Florida in the early 2000s I thought I had some kind of creative machine in mind that was beginning to make sense.

Then I moved next door to Pat Greene, an incredible person who had a profound influence on how I saw the world and thought about art. Pat seemed to understand instinctively that an idea did not need to be fully explained, professionally organized, or officially sanctioned before people could begin doing something with it. Our first project together, the Virginia Heights Project, was a fictional recreation of the neighborhood where we lived. We walked, researched, invented histories, organized events, and used humor to pierce the stuffiness thinking about neighborhoods and community . What mattered was not simply the project itself, but the experience of building something with a group of people.

By the time I moved back to Virginia in 2008, I had a clearer sense of what I wanted Philosophy INC to become. I no longer wanted it to exist only as a website, a personal investigation, or a name attached to things I made alone. I wanted to activate it within a community. Again, serendipitously, I met two artists, Jim Leftwich and Ralph Eaton, who had a huge influence on me as an artist and collaborator.

Jim and Ralph had developed a regular event in Roanoke called Collab Fest, loosely inspired by Hakim Bey’s idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. Artists would gather, bring materials, exchange ideas, improvise, and create work together without much concern for hierarchy, ownership, polish, or permanence. The event created a temporary space in which people were free to experiment and where the social experience of making art was as important as the finished objects.

Through Pat, Jim, Ralph, and the larger group of friends and artists around them, I began to understand that Philosophy INC was not only about investigating places. It was also about creating situations in which people could meet, walk, talk, make things, exchange knowledge, and temporarily inhabit the world differently. Friendship was not separate from the work. Projects gave us reasons to spend time together, and our time together gave the projects their energy, humor, and meaning.

And I think this was where a lot of my ideas began to coalesce into a much more creative device. If capitalism and the spectacle had destroyed community and connection, then Philosophy INC could be used to create new meanings. Early on in my experiences, friends and I would take long walks across the city, seeing how neighborhoods connect, finding hidden wooded areas. I would often take a camera and try to look for new ways to see the city, new vistas, new eyes, fresh connections. While we walked we’d talk about what we knew about places, decide upon taking a new direction and maybe discover a new place to explore. And through this we were doing a kind of psychogeography, community building, learning about our city and some kind of meaning and knowledge creation.

If I could say that Philosophy INC had operating principles these would be described more appropriately as something I was just doing at the time and not so much as an intentional practice. I am writing a manifesto 20 years after the fact. Some of the Philosophy INC operating principles are:

Explore your surroundings with curiosity and on your own terms. Walk outside of familiar routes, notice what has been forgotten or displaced, and follow small clues into larger histories. Preserve local memory and make the past visible through research, documentation, and creative public forms. Turn the city into maps, films, tours, posters, performances, temporary institutions, and occasions for people to gather. Work with others, support fellow artists, take ideas seriously without taking yourself too seriously, and keep the process playful, open, and alive.

There was a time when I just wanted to take photos and hang them on walls. Out of high school my father had purchased for me a correspondence course in photography and I’d learned to handle myself fairly well with a Canon AE-1. By the time Philosophy INC had become active, I discovered multiple ways to create and get my point across, using a lot of video, physical mediums, the internet, gallery spaces, posters, and postcards. I didn’t confine Philosophy INC’s production to a single medium. Some of the things I created were:

I don't know exacrly how to end this. There are a lot of people I've left out -girlfriends, post-neos, my early DIY punk rock experiences. I think toward that end I'll just consider this to be a continually living document and not a closed door.