“As I was drawing up the initial sketches for this piece, which was to be installed on a building intended as living quarters for students at the University of Michigan, I was thinking about what it means to be a student, and about institutes of higher learning in general. In my own college experience (at Western Michigan University and Oakland University), my focus was always on learning for learning’s sake; I wanted to absorb as much knowledge as possible, with the idea that knowledge tends to beget knowledge, and learning how to learn is a discipline in itself. I loved being in school.

Then my thoughts turned to German author Hermann Hesse’s final novel, “The Glass Bead Game”.

The titular subject is a game of the mind, in which players are called upon to make connections between unrelated concepts in a novel way. It’s not even really a game, and there are really not even any glass beads (its name comes from an early, rudimentary form of the game). But what it has to do with, in a nutshell (I’m not here to relay an entire plot synopsis of the novel, haha) is the existence of an intellectual synthesis of all arts and sciences, and particularly that of mathematics and music.

What I wanted to do with this mural, then, was create an abstract visual representation of what this “game” or synthesis could look like. On a very basic level, there’s plenty of math and geometry involved in the design and positioning of the elements of the mural, and a big part of their placement has to do with imaginary points in an (again, imaginary) musical score. The idea (or the hope) is that it all comes together in such a way that the immediate community of residents and students – maybe on a subconscious level – can be inspired by this commingling of art and science, and begin to see and make connections in the eventual realization that all things are, in fact, connected – not only ideologically and conceptually, but actually.

High aspirations, I know!

I also wanted to make a mural that would look great; one that The Standard, the Ann Arbor Art Center, the city of Ann Arbor and I myself could be proud of. In that, I hope I succeeded. In the initial concept and goal, I guess it falls to the individual, as all art depends on the viewer for the takeaway.

Incidentally, the idea for Hesse’s novel arose from tensions his own community was feeling as the Nazi Party in Germany was on the rise; it was eventually published in Switzerland after being rejected in Germany for its anti-fascist stance. As long as the mural is riffing on ideas put forth in Hesse’s novel, I’ll adopt anti-fascism as another one of its conceptual facets as well.

— Mike Ross