The current mainstream film

In Good Company

, which makes half-hearted stabs at revealing the nature of identity and the meaning of life, features a scene in which advertising is (gasp) mocked. An iconic figure of modern corporate hipsterism stands before a crowd of his adoring employees and repeats the company's mantra-the concept of synergy-until an heroic everyman steps up and points out that he's not making any sense. This, of course, is true in the movie's context; it's just a bunch of fancy pitch-man psycho-babble and ought to be shot down. Still, the scene serves, as many other situations have, to do big harm to a good word.

Freedom, though arguably compromised as a word for quite some time, took a beating during its 27 citings in the president's second inaugural speech. If you're prone to sappiness about a concept of freedom that differs noticeably from the president's, the zombie-style repetition of the word, to the point that it loses all power and sense, can be wildly close to heartbreaking. Why is it we're able to maintain protections, laws, regulations and both government and private bodies dedicated to protecting a host of rights for everything from wildlife to "decency" to tax loopholes, but language just hangs out in the wind, every word available for a public lynching without much defense?

Well, it's not an altogether invisible debate…those fussy Europeans in particular have resisted, at least academically, both manipulative and natural evolutions of their respective languages. But it's evolution that in fact prevents us from protecting language. We can't safeguard language anymore than

we can stop the process of art in time. There will always be results of varying value, crudity and foolishness but words must remain alive. "Synergy," for example, is a regrettable word to have marginalized but it would be even worse to enforce upon it a lack of malleability. Because the gelatinous amoebic biology at the point where disparities collide into synergism is the point at which human life leaves drudgery behind and gets, well, bitchin'.

I like to think Thomas Ashcraft would agree. His work comes to mind considering problems of language, not because it is text-based in any way, but because it is more purely about communication, about the relationship between systems, than most endeavors, artistic or otherwise. Ashcraft is also perhaps adrift in a larger, synergistic consciousness because he is the recent recipient of a singular quirky honor, having had an illustration of his work, a shadow of a shadow, appear in the New Yorker's calendar section recently. More to the point, Ashcraft is one of the reasons the process of art cannot be stopped in time. When he created an exhibition/tableau/science project/ode to interzonal literature at SITE Santa Fe in 1998, the writer Malin Wilson suggested the following:

When I am faced with Ashcraft's concerns in the realm of cellular biology and the realm of the dynamics of money, which he calls "tradecake," and the realm of stuff hurtling through space, the so-called art world seems a chilly, narrow arena. Ashcraft's semiprivate, semipublic, semimercantile propositions feel problematic and a bit too real. He treats us like fully consenting adults who live in a big world.

Ashcraft himself avoids loaded words like "synergy," but the title of his current show in New York at the COE Foundation is

The Heliotown Concurrences

, pointing to the artist's movable feast of a laboratory-Heliotown-as a nexus (another now spooky piece of jargon, co-opted by insincerity) for everything from cast coins of an alien realm to the deep, feedback tinged whalesong of solar flares, all operating in flattering tandem.

So picture at one end of a room, a tiny, sandcast bronze disc, a homemade piece of money, ready to leaden the purse of a fantasy realm, part Burroughs, part Middle Earth, part elemental object. Picture at the other end an audio/visual charting of cosmic fireballs, gleaned from a shack full of satellite dishes, radio antennae and other surplus paranoiac paraphernalia. Tying such elements together is a landscape of possible plants, animals and modern myths, all cobbled together from found-sought out rather-happenstance objects. And through it all: curious, surprising synergy. A playful scientist's secret art religion of interconnectivity.

I'm jealous of COE Foundation and of New York for having our Tom Ashcraft right now. I'm jealous because his shows in Santa Fe have been occasions never to forget, experiences less like art exhibitions and more like a child's first visit to a museum full of dinosaurs and other startling wonders. Ashcraft pieces together quiet epics in the service of examining all forms of exchange, reminding us that any art which offers no give and take is a failure. So then is the use of a word without the intention of meaning behind it. So then is art, and its muse life, without exploration and the artful telling of that exploration.

We find it easy to understand that chrome, nickel and steel are a synergistic alloy, stronger in collaboration than as separate entities. We find it difficult to remember that adventure (on any scale), exchange (in any medium), and understanding (in varying depths) conspire to create a synergistic life. We feel mysteriously strong in isolation, but real strength lies in togetherness. Just as Ashcraft draws from many sources and materials to create his work, we must draw from many sources to create community-art community, social community, economic community, global community. I suppose if we want to we can sell out those words-like "freedom" and "synergy"-which define our accomplishments and continuing aspirations, but it would be a shame to lose the meaning. We hear you played well in New York, Tom. Don't forget to come on home, though. We still need your mad science.