Max grew up on farms in southern Missouri, studied Math at MIT, Chinese at the Defense Language Institute, graduate school art in Taiwan. He was an intern for several years to internationally known artist Chen Ting-shih.

He has worked in both hardware and software with ten patents in milk cartons, gymnastic equipment, scanners, film recorders, compiler techniques, CAD, and UI. Software projects include manufacturing control, Visicorp products, Laplink, Sim City, and the Sims.

By using robots he has been able to combine his lifelong interests in mathematics of life, hardware and software. His approach provides an individual path combing emotional and intellectual truth in an image.

His goals are to depict systems rather than objects, blend different scales of a object, microscopic and macroscopic, cellular and chemical in layers to provide a rich shared experience. He adds calligraphic lines that make visual jazz riffs on the fundamental elements of the image.