Buckminster Fuller Challenge & Whitney Exhibition

Next week I head to New York where the Buckminster Fuller Challenge will award John Todd $100k for his Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia based on a new theory of ecological design and The Whitney Museum will open its retrospective exhibition on Fuller's life entitled "Starting With The Universe." I joined the Board of Directors last January whose members include Bucky's daughter Allegra and grandson Jaime, contemporaries and new members who are taking Fuller's legacy and vision to new heights. To get a sense take a look at the new video:


The Buckminster Fuller Challenge from Buckminster Fuller Institute on Vimeo.


Let me know if you are in NY next week.

Paz
Mark
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oaxaca & oliver sacks - patterns

Oliver Sacks who has lived in and written about Oaxaca recently wrote an article appearing in the NY Times entitled "Patterns." He writes:

"I have had migraines for most of my life; the first attack I remember occurred when I was 3 or 4 years old. I was playing in the garden when a brilliant, shimmering light appeared to my left — dazzlingly bright, almost as bright as the sun. It expanded, becoming an enormous shimmering semicircle stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp zigzagging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors. Then, behind the brightness, came a blindness, an emptiness in my field of vision, and soon I could see almost nothing on my left side. I was terrified — what was happening? My sight returned to normal in a few minutes, but these were the longest minutes I had ever experienced.

I told my mother what had happened, and she explained to me that what I had had was a migraine — she was a doctor, and she, too, was a migraineur. It was a “visual migraine,” she said, or a migraine “aura.” The zigzag shape, she would later tell me, resembled that of medieval forts, and was sometimes called a “fortification pattern.”

This was a truly beautiful and insightful description of a phenomenon I have experienced for as long as I can remember. I have lived in Oaxaca, Mexico now for over five years, drawn here by some attractive force and random coincidence. Since being here this attraction has become more localized to a particular piece of ground beneath a tree overlooking the pyramids of Monte Alban. I feel as though I lived here at some time. At least something is intimately familiar. Today I recognize that the pattern I see when I experience my aural migraines is a jagged shape similar to the style of patterns found throughout Zapotec culture.

Sacks makes this connection too:

"Migraine-like patterns, so to speak, are seen not only in Islamic art, but in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry — in virtually every culture. There seems to have been, throughout human history, a need to externalize, to make art from, these internal experiences, from the decorative motifs of prehistoric cave paintings to the psychedelic art of the 1960s."


He also references hallucinations produced by mezcal, an agave based liquor produced here:

Many years later, as a young doctor, I read a little book (really two little books) by the great neurologist Heinrich Klüver, “Mescal” and “Mechanisms of Hallucination.” Klüver not only culled many accounts from the literature, but experimented with mescal himself, and described geometric visual hallucinations typical of the early stages of the mescal experience: “Transparent oriental rugs, but infinitely small … plastic filigreed spherical objets d’art [like] radiolaria … wallpaper designs … cobweb-like figures or concentric circles and squares … architectural forms, buttresses, rosettes, leafwork, fretwork.”

On my 44th birthday, July 10, 2002, five months before I discovered Oaxaca, I wrote this poem:

44

Thinkin of mom
Waitin for the bomb
Thoughts of fleetin
Things heatin

Scratchin
Crawlin
Reachin
Breathin

Where will I be
Whom will I see
Lay me by a tree
Let me see thee

Before during after now
Don’t know how
But makin a vow
Before during after now

Keep listenin
Keep breathin
Open wide
Slide inside

Move from here
Live without fear
Open your eyes
Strengthen your ties.


I have spent long hours beneath the tree at Monte Alban and at times, when opening my eyes it seems, I have Zapotec-like visions. I wonder what self-organizing activity in the vast populations of my own visual neurons led me to this place and why? I know my attraction has to do with the light here but perhaps there is more to discover through the ancient patterns that decorate the culture here.

Dr. Sacks has given me a lot to think about in this regard:

"What we can say, in general terms, is that these hallucinations reflect the minute anatomical organization, the cytoarchitecture, of the primary visual cortex, including its columnar structure — and the ways in which the activity of millions of nerve cells organizes itself to produce complex and ever-changing patterns. We can actually see, through such hallucinations, something of the dynamics of a large population of living nerve cells and, in particular, the role of what mathematicians term deterministic chaos in allowing complex patterns of activity to emerge throughout the visual cortex. This activity operates at a basic cellular level, far beneath the level of personal experience. They are archetypes, in a way, universals of human experience."

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brave new world

I'm sitting here between Christmas and New Years working on the name for an event my partners and I are planning for October 2008 in San Francisco that identifies and addresses the wicked problems of reforming our global infrastructure, starting with the capital markets. Here's my sketch book so far:

Popular Words
Youtube
Pop tech
Google
Wired
Fast company
Zeitgeist
IPod
Open source
software
inspiration
design
social network
green
sustainable
tribes
global village

practice words
socialware 2008
capital, technology & design for the global village

open social

the tribes

Picking up the magazine Dwell (love that word) and saw an article on an exhibit at the Walker in Minneapolis entitled "Brave New World" after the book by Alduous Huxley.

Walker Art Exhibit “Brave New World”
The exhibition title, inspired by Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, capitalizes on its ambivalent resonance. “We came upon ‘brave new worlds’ because we thought that in front of us are a range of approaches to the world that are critical but ultimately hopeful,” says Chong. “Then, we realized that the expression, in daily parlance, actually expresses ambivalence toward the relentless forward movement of modernity, and that’s precisely what’s found in Huxley’s book... Made into the plural form, “brave new worlds”—the micro-worlds proposed by the artists—present a multiplicity of interpretations and perspectives that critically cut through the collective haze of the “globe” that obscures the world’s many realities… Brave New Worlds assesses the current state of political consciousness and its multivalent artistic manifestations in an era characterized by the unraveling of a unified world order.

practice word
Brave New World
Capital Technology & Design for the Global Village

By the way in the Chinese pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale Cao Fei introduced her documentary iMirror, “filmed” entirely in Second Life and directed by her SL avatar China Tracy. Check out these videos.


...which led me to McLuhan who predicted the rise of tribes and the global village giving way to a global theater...and who said:

When a thing is current, it creates currency.

sketch book
social currents
social currency

living systems

and then this by Bruce Sterling in the same issue of Dwell:

"We're on a slider bar between the Unthinkable and the Unimaginable. Sustainability is a mighty effort to haul that slider bar toward general survival as the smoldering planet groans at the seams. The Unthinkable is a global Somalia, Bahhdad as the world's model city. The unimaginable is a set of awesome interventions we scarcely have words for yet: new design, new manufacturing, new culture, new cites, new infrastructure, new factories."

value
I like Laurance Allen's magazine title - Value - an economist like publication that rigorously reviews sustainability, new forms of capital and business.

Will keep working on this....

parallel systems vs. existing systems

An email response to this note from Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012, Return of the Quetzalcoatl."

"I just published an essay that may be of interest to this group. In it, I am looking at the potential of an imminent financial meltdown as mass defaults on personal debt follow the sub-prime mortgage market collapse, which could push banks and insurers into insolvency. This crisis could lead to a regeneration of the Left, as people will need interpretive grids to understand what has hit them. I am very interested in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s work in “Empire” and “Multitude”, and think that those works provide an important conceptual framework. Of course, it is also possible that the financial collapse, if it happens, could lead to an increased authoritarianism, demonization of immigrant groups as enemies, etc.

The essay, “When the Other Shoe Drops”, can be found at http://realitysandwich.com . I am hoping it will stimulate debate. A major question is whether our political and economic system can be reformed in order to deal with the accelerating and intermeshing climate crises, resource crises, financial and military crises, etc. If not, a different type of solution is going to have to emerge from civil society."

Yours,
Daniel

Thanks Daniel for your provocative piece and for Bruce’s response.

Having spent 11 years working on Wall Street and many years since following the capital markets I am very familiar with calls for financial meltdowns. Nevertheless with each and every crisis since Depression era reforms- the oil lending crisis in the 70’s, the savings and loan debacle in the 80’s, or the sub-prime mortgage and consumer debt threat- the Federal Reserve System survives despite massive and repeated write-downs of public and private debt. While a compelling case can be made that “this is it,” in terms of systemic collapse I suggest such speculation is futile in the end. Rather I think we are better served by focusing on the creation of a parallel cooperation-based system as alluded to in your article, the rise of social enterprises around the world where entrepreneurs target both social and financial returns, and the rise of a new social capital market that blends the efficiencies of market-based systems with values based missions and incentives.

I would also argue that we are already in the middle of a crisis in consciousness and in the midst of “a major opening of awareness and compassionate understanding.” As complexity rises and communication potential expands humans seem to move more like swarms in reaction to ever-sharper views of their nest. The trick it seems to me in this environment is to be attentive and supportive of what is arising on its own at local levels. In my view, needs are best defined at local levels while global structures create horizontal efficiencies where common patterns or needs (at local levels) can be recognized and/or supported.

I agree media will play an influential role, particularly with the evolution of online and physical social networks of all kinds that support local and cooperative decision-making; and user generated video and gaming where we are rapidly becoming experts at rapid-prototyping simulated environments and extrapolating our experience into real structures in physical space. I have more confidence that a new system will arise in this context than I do in one arising from entrenched, industrial age hierarchies and nation-state based political systems.

Kevin Jones, Tim Freundlich and I have begun to build the framework for a 30,000 foot view of the social capital market that we hope many on this list can contribute to. Here is a link to a very preliminary framework that we hope to build on with the help of a wide community.

Our hope is that by making the landscape more clear more resources will flow toward it. Like Bruce I have great respect for the work of the others copied here and appreciate any comments you have.

Paz
Mark Beam
Oaxaca, Mexico
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Hi Bruce, Mark, and Schuyler,

Thanks for your responses to my essay. I appreciate the dialogue!

Personally, I wonder whether, with even the best intentions of many bright and inspired people, the current financial and political system can survive the transformations that are now under way, and increasing in velocity. I felt this same concern, very powerfully, at Bioneers last fall. An oceanographer described the emptying of the oceans and the disappearance of food chains in the oceans, and asked the elite liberal audience to "take less (fish) out" and petition their representatives to do more. This seemed insignificant compared to the scale of the problem.

I agree with Negri and Hardt that communication is critical in the "production of subjectivities" whose choices determine the movements of capital and resources. As Mark and Bruce note, the evolution of “peer-to-peer” social networks could lead to a system that supported a populace educated on critical issues, and capable of acting in concert - a type of "swarm intelligence." This type of system might supplant or possibly replace many of the functions currently performed by government. The current market economy could be augmented by a barter/exchange system using a trust rating, and also a gift economy (Lewis Hyde's book "The Gift" is a great read on this subject). Even to survive in a modified form, currency may have to go through an evolutionary shift, with money indexed to perishable goods or resources, rather than an immortal abstraction.

It is interesting to consider that "Wall Street" got its name from the original wall built by the Dutch settlers to keep out the indigenous people. That wall also represents the great divide between the economic system of the Europeans and the Native Americans, the first based on the Logos of the market, and the second based on the Eros of the gift. As Hyde discusses in his book, we could evolve a system that breaks down this divide.

Since protest culture and straightforward opposition to the current regime of "biopower" seems somewhat pointless, the best strategy may be to create a mechanism that allows for an internal exodus to an alternative support system, that uses communications and media tools to educate and transform consciousness. Such a system could encourage the development and "rapid prototyping" of different solution-based approaches in many spheres of life.

The current perturbations in the financial system may not lead to a "collapse," as Mark noted: The system is highly resilient. But even so, they may provide the opportunity for a deeper opening of awareness and an investment in creative alternatives.

Sorry to take up your bandwidth - thanks for your time.

Yours,
Daniel

the inner swarm

Interesting research on swarms is being undertaken by Iain D. Couzin first with insects and animals but leading to experiments wth humans. Most intriguing to me is the following comment:

“One of the really fun things that we’re doing now is understanding how the type of feedbacks in these groups is like the ones in the brain that allows humans to make decisions,” Dr. Couzin said. Those decisions are not just about what to order for lunch, but about basic perception — making sense, for example, of the flood of signals coming from the eyes. “How does your brain take this information and come to a collective decision about what you’re seeing?” Dr. Couzin said. The answer, he suspects, may lie in our inner swarm."

My take on the idea of your "inner swarm" is your local family, environment or ecosystem...that all you need to act (locally or globally) comes from clues found in your most local swarms. My sense is that defining degrees of locality or closeness comes first from those in direct physical proximity - i.e. where you live (spatial intelligence) and then progressively outward with intimacy carried more broadly through other networking tools like telephones, internet etc..

Fascinating stuff!
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the internet creates consensus around icons

I was recently interviewed by Haydn Shaughnessy, columnist for the Irish Times on the art market and its phenomenal appreciation in the past year, particularly in the contemporary market. My take from the article:

That pessimistic note is not shared by art dealer and financier Mark Beam. Still involved in the world of finance, Beam was previously a stock-market trader in New York, the breed of investor that some argue has contributed to the putative art bubble.

"There will be a correction because that's the way markets behave, but underneath all that, the internet is making it easier for people to build a consensus around iconic images and to desire them," he argues. It is a point underlined by developments in the art market.

...Values in the market for contemporary artists have risen 111 per cent in the past 12 months. If a combination of those forces referred to by King - more people now like art - and by Beam - the internet creates consensus around icons - then rather than straining at a gossamer-thin bubble, the art market could be in for more of the same, driven by a more visually eager world.

Time to roll out the contemporary art fund business plan I wrote 2 years ago....Here's the full article:

Prices for well-known pieces are going through the roof at art auctions, but is this just a bubble or simply an indication of growing demand for contemporary work, asks Haydn Shaughnessy.

When the hammer fell on William Percy French's The Mountains of Mourne in the May auction of Irish artists at Bonham's this year, the sale price of €25,000 was six times the anticipated value. Paul Henry's Dooega, Achill Island, slated at €40,000, sold for €260,000.

Around the world the auction house Christie's spent the summer of 2007 setting new record prices for living and modern artists, recording global sales of £1.63 billion (€2.4 billion) for the first six months of the year, a rise of 32 per cent on last year's figure. Equally significant was that a total of 358 works sold for more than $1 million (€730,000), compared with 189 auctioned above that price during the same period last year.

It is already popular wisdom to suggest that these rises are the sure signs of an art bubble. Perhaps also indicative of a kind of fever is that record prices are being achieved by obscure objects, such as the French designer Prouvé's kit-form house, a prefab designed for colonists in Brazzaville, which, except for three prototypes, was never actually built. One sold at auction in July for almost $5 million (€3.65 million). At the start of 2007, before Christie's remarkable rise in revenues, the International Herald Tribune was already asking if this market was a bubble ready to pop. (Image by Michael Grey, not part of the original article)

On the issue of an art bubble, there are dissenting views and they come not only from the auction houses prospering from rising values. According to Irish fine-art expert Mark Adams: "Look at 19th-century Irish paintings which were popular five years ago. Today you can't sell a 19th-century Irish painting. Taste has moved to the front end of the last century." As well as a bubble, investors need to be aware of fickle tastes.

There are three main reasons for price rises globally, according to experts at auctioneers Christie's. "There is a broader spread of wealth and it goes very deep," says Lisa King, international managing director at the firm.

"All emerging markets - China, Russia, India, the CIS and Middle East - are buying into anything contemporary. First they buy their national ilk, Chinese buyers buy Chinese artists, but then they move to other markets. But also people are more interested in art."

Could the real driving force in rising art values be not simply the spread of hyperwealth but an extension of the art-loving audience? In an article in the Art Newspaper earlier this month, New York gallery director and critic Jane Kallir argued that the art market has risen because of a structural imbalance within the art world.

"For the past century or so, the art world has been supported by four principal pillars: artists, collectors, dealers and the art-historical establishment (critics, academics, and curators)," she writes. "Now, it seems, collectors have taken charge. Over the long term, art-historical value is determined by consensus among all four art-world pillars. When any one of the four entities assumes disproportionate power, there is a danger that this entity's personal preferences will cloud everyone's short-term judgment. Put bluntly, the danger of a collector-driven art world is that money will trump knowledge."

Art, argues Kallir, has become the common denominator in the social lives of the rich, making the odd masterpiece. That pessimistic note is not shared by art dealer and financier Mark Beam. Still involved in the world of finance, Beam was previously a stock-market trader in New York, the breed of investor that some argue has contributed to the putative art bubble. (image by Michael Grey, not part of the original article)

"There will be a correction because that's the way markets behave, but underneath all that the internet is making it easier for people to build a consensus around iconic images and to desire them," he argues. It is a point underlined by developments in the art market.

Green Car Crash by US pop-artist Andy Warhol, whose career was not predicted to rise posthumously into the stratosphere, sold for $71 million (€51 million) this summer. Warhol has ridden the crest of the recent price rises and he is precisely the type of artist whose work features around the internet. "The headlines are very much focused on the modern and contemporary markets," argues Christie's Lisa King, "but the rest of the market has had a more steady and much more measured growth."

Values in the market for contemporary artists have risen 111 per cent in the past 12 months. If a combination of those forces referred to by King - more people now like art - and by Beam - the internet creates consensus around icons - then rather than straining at a gossamer-thin bubble, the art market could be in for more of the same, driven by a more visually eager world.

Indeed, the desire of many of the world's leading galleries to present their wares to a wider public is also part of this story, putting art on the agenda of an ever larger audience.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art's outreach programme is one example of taking art to the people. In mid-July, London's Tate Gallery launched the BT Tate Player, an online service providing access to a wide range of its collections as well as to interviews with artists recorded over a 30-year period.

The Tate's website now attracts 18 million visitors a year and gallery director Nicholas Serota wants to see it grow, arguing that public galleries have been slow to exploit the full potential of the internet to connect with wider audiences.

"We should be a leader in this field - there's this wealth of material which could be out there," says Serota. "Initiatives like [ BT Tate player] could change the way we think about programming our exhibitions and allow our audience to shape our programming more."

As a result of these advances, the Tate is beginning to think about how to establish communities of interest around certain artists and events. The Tate's new media director, Will Gompertz, cites the use of the photo-upload site Flickr and the social-networking site MySpace as two additional ways the gallery is reaching out to a wider public. Art, arguably, is coming under the democratising influence of the internet.

ANOTHER NOTABLE development, though, is the decision of key players in the art market to pursue the cutting edge of contemporary art. One feature of the June sales this year was the disposal of key works from the 1970s by the collectors Elaine and Melvin Merians so that they could refocus their collection on more contemporary artists. It signifies two features of the advancing art market. The first is the entry of more highly valued works in response to burgeoning prices. Now is the time to sell and some of the rapid rises in prices might also be explained by the fact that collectors, such as the Merians, have been tempted into releasing more valued works.

The second, however, is that the market is prizing contemporary works above all else. The very currency of works in a world of more rapid communications appears to be a factor.

Still, critics such as Jane Kallir are not convinced that, overall, the dynamic is itself of value. In her July excoriation of the market she complained: "This is a market with a voracious appetite for alleged masterpieces, and little patience for historical or developmental nuances."

If that argument holds water, then rather than anticipating an imminent financial collapse, the answer lies in a new kind of dialogue, one where the art-historical community comes to terms with the requirements of a new audience but perhaps also encourages that new audience to grow in aesthetic complexity. What we may be witnessing is not just a growing market, but one that is changed and won't readily fit back into its historical shape.

That certainly seems to be the case in Ireland. "For a while now everyone's waited for a collapse," says Mark Adams. "But I don't see that. There's enough power in the market and the market has grown long enough, for 10 or 15 years, for us to have to accept that these valuations are now justified."

If that holds true in Ireland, then you might ask why would it not in the rest of the world?

swarming intelligence

I am seeing sooooo much buzz happening around the new emerging capital market for good through my involvement in xigi.net and goodcap.net. It gives me great confidence that "the future is here but not evenly distributed yet" as William Gibson says. For now it can be found in swarms forming around certain nests of activity:

1. Socially responsible investing, the most minimal effort required by an investor who wants to screen their investments from tobacco, oil, etc...is trillions of dollars now, and the actions many more corporations are taking to improve their eco-social impact in response to client/consumer demand are increasing.

2. The rise of clean technology and microfinance as "serious" investment sectors where capital is being deployed that directly impacts ecology and society. In just 5-7 years clean tech now represents nearly 10% of all venture investments for example.

3. The increased attention that is being directed toward these kinds of models is just beginning. (see a blog i wrote and graph representing the movement of these sectors along a curve from "social trigger" to "maturity" - . This "blended value" sector is more mature than we think. Well at least there is great precedent being created.

Merrill Lynch is starting to put "blended value" investment products on their platform; More and more social MBA programs at business schools are being launched; Job sites like justmeans.com that are targeting this sector are appearing; Rating and certification entites like bcorporation.net are arising; social stock exchanges like altruistiq.com and bovespasocial.com.br are being created. In short, many pieces of market infrastructure are being put in place that blend social and financial value in what some call the emerging capital market for good. You can find a lot more at www.xigi.net which seeks to make this landscape more clear.

At the same time there is a new infrastructure unfolding empowered by our increasing ability to form groups around particular interests and activities and to take some some sort of action.

According to Frank Lacombe from the University of Calagary: "The collective intelligence of the swarm emerges in a decentralized way from the actions of individual insects responding to local stimuli from the environment and, most importantly, from other members of the swarm. There is no “boss” in charge. No individual insect grasps the big picture. Yet in the aggregate, the local actions of each insect based on the local stimuli available to it can accomplish a collective goal that serves the interests of the whole community."

There are swarms forming around various nests of "good" socio-economic activity that serve a collective goal that is now becoming more clear. The future is becoming more well distributed.

paz
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Image above from National Geographic. Swarm video by Alan Sondheim...

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