Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

Transforming Futures: Imagining the Cities of Tomorrow

Transforming Futures
A SPACE Exhibition Project 2011-2012

Curator:  Anna Carlevaris
Coordinator on behalf of SPACE: Frank Mulvey

“Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.”
- Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969)

Call for Submissions and Project Description

SPACE – Science Participating with Arts and Culture in Education  – is an inter-disciplinary, collaborative initiative at Dawson that encourages critical dialogue and innovative thinking. In keeping with the SPACE mission, the exhibition will be open to all departments. The exhibition’s theme will be the city of the future. Students under the guidance of teachers will create works that imagine a livable and thriving future city, a place that they could dream of and hope for.

Teachers will make a selection of the best pieces and submit them to the selection committee to be considered for inclusion in theTransforming Futures exhibition. Teachers themselves may also submit proposals for consideration, as well as staff, retirees and individuals outside the college.  The selection committee will be comprised of the project organizers and SPACE committee members. If sufficient entries are accepted from students, faculty, staff, retirees and individuals from outside the college, two installments of the exhibition will be held back-to-back. The first would be the student contributions, and the second would be the contributions of others.   Otherwise, there will be one exhibition for all participants.

Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) is the inspirational starting point for this project.
There are a few of Fuller’s principles (which he either formulated or adapted, or are associated with him) that together form the conceptual platform of this exhibition, they include: ‘synergy’, ‘spaceship earth’, “tensegrity’, ‘dymaxion’, ‘whole systems thinking’, and ‘do more with less’. These terms suggest notions of community and collaboration, and elements or forces working dynamically together. Collectively, these concepts act as metaphor for the approach that will be used for exploring the project’s main theme: “cities”. Fuller’s worldview may be taken as a model for thinking about Dawson College as an integrated system of learning, creativity, and social and personal actualization. What Fuller and other innovators like him have demonstrated is that all is imaginable when our creativity, in consort with our analytical, empathic, and intuitive faculties, is given the chance to flourish.

The subject of technology will play an important role in the exhibition, nevertheless, technology per se should not be the exclusive focus of the submissions. Works should address Fuller’s key concept of the “big picture”, and the interrelatedness of people and other living things in their shared habitat. Ethical considerations, and ideas for how to maintain equilibrium amongst individuals, groups, and their built environments should be paramount. Proposals should be directed away from distopic visions.  Although pervasive in popular culture today, views of repressive or controlled societies do not reflect Fuller’s intentions.

While the exhibition itself is focused on Fuller’s humanist vision of the future, the project organizers strongly encourage alternate viewpoints to be heard. In order to provide a venue for critical dialogue, a panel discussion with invited participants from both inside and outside the College, will be held in conjunction with the exhibition. SPACE’s interdisciplinary web magazine will be another forum for discussing the cities of tomorrow from a multitude of perspectives that may focus on social, political, or economic issues amongst other relevant concerns.

Teachers are invited to formulate class projects for their students in the fall semester that tie in with this proposed project. Each teacher who decides to come on board on behalf of their students will be asked to make a selection of their student’s projects at the end of the fall semester, and to forward submissions (and attached written statements) to exhibition coordinator Frank Mulvey at fmulvey@dawsoncollege.qc.ca by December 12, 2011 to be considered for inclusion in the Transforming Futures exhibition by the selection committee. This committee shall also review other proposals from Dawson faculty, staff, retirees and those outside the college. Proposals can include material that can be experienced in the gallery as an exhibition, and also other material and events (such as performance) that can appear elsewhere to complement the gallery experience.

"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody."
- Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

Buckminster Fuller (b1895-d1983):
Quotations

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969)

Dare to be naïve.
Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)

Don't fight forces, use them.
Shelter (1932) Sometimes quoted as "Don't oppose forces, use them."

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.
Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects of Humanity (1969)

The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done.
Letter to "Michael" (16 February 1970) Michael was a 10 year old boy who had inquired in a letter as to whether Fuller was a "doer" or a "thinker".

I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.
I Seem to Be a Verb (1970)

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
Interview (30 April 1978)

The most important thing to teach your children is that the sun does not rise and set. It is the Earth that revolves around the sun. Then teach them the concepts of North, South, East and West, and that they relate to where they happen to be on the planet's surface at that time. Everything else will follow.
Final interview before his death, "NewsCenter4", WNBC-TV (1983)

Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969)

Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.
Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)

Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two.
Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)

There are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and noninterfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal.
Critical Path (1981)

CALL ME TRIMTAB
B. Fuller’s epitaph.