November 18, 2023
A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.
Geometrically Optimizing the Future
Bonnie DeVarco joined us for two sessions this week in coheART 3 of the Design Science Studio. Bonnie painted a portrait of R. Buckminster Fuller as a performance artist, wearing the suit of an accountant, while modeling how everything is made of energy, an integrity of physics and metaphysics.
Designing Solutions, Modeling Mind
The Whole Systems Artistry of Buckminster Fuller
I’ll be talking about nature, design science, whole systems, and what it means to be an artist within this context. My favorite quote from Buckminster Fuller is “I’m not trying to imitate nature. I’m trying to find the principles she is using.” And I love that he says “she.” You've got Mother Nature, Gaia, Pachamama. We really need to embrace the planet that we are a part of, that we live inside, this universe. And nature is our guide. And he used that so beautifully in his life. And I believe that much of what he did, in a modeling way, was absolutely art. So since all of you are artists, I talked to Roxi last week about, “Maybe, I’ll put together a little visualization—using a buckyball, of course—of artists. And, you know, art is one of the most transdisciplinary of disciplines. You can see writers, dancers, sculptors, designers, photographers, media artists, architects. There’s so many ways that we consider ourselves artists. An artist is using intuition and using inspiration and bringing creative flows into the world. Now Bucky was an artist, and he had so many people that he worked with, many of which were artists. And you're going to see some very familiar names here: Josef and Anni Albers, Bill and Elaine DeKooning, László Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes, Cy Twombly, Ken Snelson, John Cage, Merce Cunningham. Those were all people that were part of Black Mountain College—the first of its kind, very much like a bohemian, almost, art environment—that started in ’33 and ended in 1957. Bucky was there in ’48 and ’49. And some other folks—I will focus more on the people that were closest to him—Isamu Noguchi, Norman Foster, Charles and Ray Eames, Frank Lloyd Wright. And my favorite person, that nobody knows, is Duncan Stewart. And you'll find out why. So I feel like the whole call of being an artist is to embrace intertransdisciplinarity. Almost like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It's one of those really long words that exists nowhere, but in my mind this morning, I thought, that's what it is. It's intertransdisciplinarity.
Synergetics
Early in the 20th century, inspired by the emerging realization in science that all manifestation in the universe is “energy” and “vibration”, Buckminster Fuller began experimenting with models of structural forms in the quest to discover how nature coordinates this energy to create all the beauty and magnificence of life. Fuller called himself a “comprehensivist”, one who holds a comprehensive perspective that seeks to synthesize apparent “parts” into an ever-unifying wholistic understanding. In his quest he discovered what he referred to as “nature’s coordinate system”, the geometric articulation of energetic relationships, which he named Synergetics.
This “energetic-synergetic” geometry became the foundation for his entire body of research and problem solving on behalf of all humankind and planet Earth for over half a century. He in fact once stated that humanity coming to understand synergetics was one of the most important steps in our evolution. As implied by the name, synergetics has at its core the principle of synergy: the behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts. For Fuller, it became clear that by understanding the principle of synergy and applying it to all aspects of designing our social and technological systems wherein we can do “more with less”, we can achieve his stated mission: “to create a world that works for 100% of humanity through spontaneous cooperation and without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
Ephemeralization
Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller in 1938, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing," that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output (products, services, information, etc.) while requiring less input (effort, time, materials, resources, etc.).
This is the process of evolution that I have witnessed over the past forty years as I have been learning, working, teaching, and mentoring in the many different ways that we have been practicing the process of design. Graphic design was classified, for tax purposes, as manufacturing when I first began my career. We were focused on the creation of physical artifacts. Years later, we are recognizing that we are actually in the process of designing entire social systems. That work is beyond the physical. In that sense, we have evolved the process of design from the physical to the metaphysical—a process of ephemeralization.
Whether we recognize it or not, we are in a process of geometrically optimizing our future through design. However, we are a very young and inexperienced species, still trying to make sense of our place in the world, which is putting at risk the physical, chemical, biological, and social integrity of our home on planet Earth.
How might we adapt by recognizing ourselves as relationships of energy in dynamic equilibrium with Universe?
U = MP describes a first division of Universe into metaphysical and physical aspects, the former associated with invisibly cohesive tension, the latter with energy events, both associative as matter and disassociative as radiation.
— Wikipedia: Synergetics (Fuller)
My own “Eureka!” moment happened this summer, when recognizing that the interface for life is found in the relationships of gravity between the Sun, Moon, and Earth, forming a tetrahedron of four spheres when we include ourselves as perceiver/observer/participant in the relationships of these four centres of gravity. In this interface, I was able to perceive the affordances for life and love—a model for life as an integration of physics and metaphysics: time, energy, and matter in a life cycle that integrates with mind, heart, and body.
The solar system is the model and the interface for life, instantiating relationships of energy as gravity and radiation. Life and love are the precessional effects of this dynamic equilibrium of relationships.
Responding and Adapting
This week, we also experienced a disruption in the relationships within the Design Science Studio, and there is a process that is ongoing to respond. The disruption happened around the definition of energy and the question of intelligence.
In response, we are learning how to navigate metaphysical gravity as pod navigators. We agreed together on a process. I added a step:
Circle back with those in navigator roles to validate that they felt supported and that needs for coherence, clarity, restoration, and resolution were met through the process of responding to disruption and rupture in the connective gravity and radiating tension of the commUnity of relationships.
Gravity and Love
543.21 The scientific word for the integral of all the special case realizations of gravity is love.
543.22 Love is the integral of gravity and radiation. Energy as either radiation or matter is the summa frequency, local-in-Universe, aberrational palpitation of comprehensive gravity embracement. Energy manifests itself as the palpitating, gravity-tolerated, aberrational pulsings-through of the plurality of exact centers of pure principles. This plurality of principles, being inherently different one from the other, have ever-varying interdomain proximities that produce varying push-pulls of the plurality of generalized principles influencing the locally-tuned-in event, which proximity variations depend on which set of principles are most informationally relevant in comprehending both the local and cosmic significance of any given local experience event.
— Synergetics: 543.00 Reality and Inexactitude
A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting
Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.
We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.