At 06:50 PM 11/6/96 +0800: >Kirby Urner, > Yes, I am still in need of an interview. I will be truly >appreciative if you can answer the questions you recieved from me. If you >know of anyone else who would be willing to respond to my interview, please >have them e-mail me at: >sanvik@pacific.net.sg > I am very thankful for you kindness. > Thanks again, > Tali Sanvik > >*If there is any way in which I can help you, I would be delighted to.If >in case you hadn't recieved the questions here they are: >
>* What influence do you believe Fuller has on people today?
I see a lot of evidence that Fuller's life work continues to serve as a guide, or valued input, to a lot of individuals thinking hard about our shared future aboard Spaceship Earth.
Jay Baldwin has recently come out with a new book, BuckyWorks (John Wiley & Sons) which summarizes a lot of what's relevant in a clear, direct style, and then goes on to supply information about how some of the research initiatives launched under Bucky's tenure have continued to yield promising, usable results.
Since 1985 or so, I've used the term 'Fuller School' (Naga, sea dragon, logo), to loosely capture my sense of a network that's working with Fuller's ideas in whole range of applications as well as innovating new ones. The Fuller School also studies Fuller's legacy in a critical light and does not work to suppress negative assessments of this or that aspect. So there's lots of room for free wheeling debate, discussion, disagreement i.e. polarities.
>* How and when did you become aware of Fuller?
I was dimly aware of Fuller as a kid. We had Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth on our shelves in the Philippines, where I attended the International School in Metro-Manila. But I really got interested after I finished at Princeton and moved to Jersey City. I read about Fuller's joint appearance with Werner Erhard in Madison Square Garden and took the PATH train into Manhatten to buy Critical Path. I was hooked. Went on to read Synergetics and so on.
>* Did Bucky influence you in any way? If so, how?
Bucky has been a major influence in my life. My writing changed course and absorbed a whole lot of geometry and other concepts via my exposure to Fuller's writings. Previously, I had been chugging along with the psychoanalysis crowd, then Ludwig Wittgenstein a lot at Princeton. I'd always been interested in mathematics and computers (took some university courses in both, and now work with computers professionally), and had a high tolerance for reading stuff that most would consider obscure or esoteric. So I wasn't put off when I found Synergetics to have a completely unique language going. And seeing how wonderfully Fuller performed in the 'real world' using thinking like this to find his way was a major inspiration to me.
Another way in which Fuller gets credit for the quality of my life is that he had a lot of very interesting and intelligent people already tuned in to his stuff long before I entered the picture. By getting mixed up with the Fuller business, I started to meet and interact with a lot of high powered 'actors' from all walks of life (female, male, young, old, lots of variety in ethnography and genetic backgrounds). Great theater!
>* How did people's views change after the geodesic dome was created?
Since I wasn't even born yet when Fuller started with his domes, I can't really speak from personal experience as to how this changed people's views. My sense, from what I've read and especially from the recently completed documentary on Fuller (Simon & Goodman, aired on USA TV via WNET/PBS and the American Masters series), is that the dome marked a turning point in Fuller's career.
>*Synergetic Geometry?
Synergetic geometry is difficult to penetrate at some levels, very easy to absorb at others. The basic 'cartoons' you need to impart the way Fuller fits his geometry together, relating shapes to sphere packings, to geodesic spheres (domes are fractions of these spheres) and to other inventions, are not difficult to watch. I've long advocated that we do more to supply kids with these basics via Sesame Street. Now that I have a two year old, I'm trying to make sure she developes a strong and vibrant visual imagination of geometric concepts. Fortunately, we have a video called 'ClockTet' by Richard Hawkins (in collaboration with myself) which Tara has loved since she was a mere infant. Still one of her favorites. Sesame Street doesn't have much yet. Nor do the schools. We're thinking to home school Tara.
Lots of Synergetics is still unexplored. It's a language that converges a lot of semantics, science concepts, philosophical angles. Fuller's aim was to be comprehensive, to give expression to a self-discipline he actually used to make his way in the world. It's kind of like a subject in the humanities in that metaphor and interpretation are important, with key concepts coming through 'between the lines' a lot -- not because Fuller wanted to be obscure, but because he felt much of what is eternally valid has a "90 degree" relationship with our modes of communication. Our media are "special case" and, as such, never capture truth. The best we can do is put ourselves on a trajectory in the direction of greater precision and closer approximation.
Synergetics, as printed, is kind of a showing, a demonstration, of what this trajectory looks like coming from Bucky. Like, text books usually have a lot of exercises for the reader. Synergetics doesn't break out the exercises into separate sections, but you get the sense, reading it, that you're exercising, and that once you get the hang of some of the generalized principles Fuller is getting at, you may have a sense "now I can go on" i.e. now I can continue with synergetics-style explorations in my own life. But you don't ever get to a place where you can say "now I'm finished." Synergetics is never finished.
Lots of people in the Fuller School are doing interesting work in various disciplines having absorbed some of the wisdom in Synergetics. They consult Bucky's writings from time to time, but it is up to each individual to do her or his own thinking. Synergetics is not a Bible that you're supposed to commit to memory and recite chapter and verse, not even knowing what you're saying, just thinking you're winning some points in heaven.
>* In general, what do you think about Bucky's work?
Very inspiring!
>* Do you believe he was one of the most important and inspiring people of >* the twentieth century? If so, why?
Yes. Because people know we're in a kind of emergency situation aboard Spaceship Earth, with limited time and resources available to commit towards viable solutions. We have a sense that the lawyer-political caste isn't able to lead us where we need to go, and that this caste is backed by giant financial networks that have a lot of corrupting greed and selfishness at their core. The corporations, in other words, own and control the keys to future viability, but as institutions may not allow the humans who organize their affairs to express their full potential as intelligent local problem solvers i.e. humans may find themselves 'strait jacketed' by institutions put in place long ago. Now that we're all so specialized in our various subdisciplines, the schemas layed down by grand masters in the past continue moving us along a perilous course towards disaster. We have no more grand masters anymore -- science just got too invisible for anyone but specialists to follow.
But Fuller stands out as an individual who was willing to put his life on the line to call it as he saw it, to not take all the ancient institutions for granted, to inspire new life, hampered by less misinformation (if they'd only steer clear of those who would deliberately misinform, and recognize bogus stuff being mindlessly passed on), to assume greater responsibility for networking across old lines of division (e.g. national boundaries) and employing a 'design science' mindset towards moving forward in a positive direction.
Design science is about working with artifacts and environments to provide life support, with or without the cooperation of political elites. It's about serving humanity without regard for superficial divisions into ethnographic and genetic categories. This is all very inspiring to me, and consistent with my intuitions of what it's going to take to get us beyond the petty dickering that goes on at the political level, while the big and looming challenges never seem to get directly addressed.
About NetForum - v.1.2.6
