The Search Light

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DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight" by Mathew Joseph Holt. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Deep in the desolate Mojave Desert in Nevada’s extreme southern tip lies a small mining town called Searchlight. This meticulously researched book by Searchlight’s most distinguished native son recounts the colorful history of the town and the lives of the hardy people who built it and sustained a community in one of the least hospitable environments in the United States. Its story encompasses both Nevada’s early twentieth-century mining boom and the phenomenal growth of southern Nevada after World War II. Searchlight is a valuable contribution to the history of Nevada and a lively account of life in the forbidding depths of the Mojave Desert.

This book is an unprecedented exploration of the nature of consciousness and its embodiment in many forms of contemporary art including painting, sculpture, installation, video, film, and computer media. At what is possibly the most portentous moment in recent history - the turn of the millennium - 'Searchlight' reveals the threads of a new aesthetic, reaching from the early nineteenth century through its extraordinary fulfillment in the art of the present. Consciousness is the bedrock of all experience, the foundation of all perception and interaction, the source of meaning. As such, it may be said to have been the primary subject of art for the past 125 years, ever since the Modernist revolution of the nineteenth century shifted artists' goals from the direct representation of the seen world to the expression of felt experience. As art increasingly focused on the perceiver rather than the perceived, the consciousness of the artist and the viewer moved to the foreground of the artistic event. The book features essays by writers in the fields of art history, philosophy, cognitive science, theology, and linguistics. Over one hundred illustrations show some of the most extraordinary works of art made over the past twenty years by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Bill Viola, Yoko Ono, Stan Douglas, Gillian Wearing, Adrian Piper, and Gary Hill. The volume also includes classic reflections on consciousness by such renowned scholars as William James, Thomas Nagel, the Dalai Lama, Francisco J. Varela, John R. Scarle, and Nobel Laureate Francis Crick. Searchlight complements an ambitious, groundbreaking exhibition of the same title organized by the CCAC Institute of the California College of Arts and Crafts. It includes a comprehensive essay by Lawrence Rinder, director of the CCAC Institute, and George Lakoff, professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and texts by Mark Bartlett, Franck André Jamme, Steve Kolpan, Alva Noe, D. J. Pughe, and Yvonne Rand.