Sunday Profile : A Global Vision : In the latest phase of his GeoSphere Project, Tom Van Sant envisions a computer accessible library where a fragile planet’s workings come to life.
Popeye the sheep dog snores right through his master’s most impassioned speech.
Holding forth in his headquarters in a converted, tumbledown Santa Monica fish restaurant, Tom Van Sant is explaining to a young man from a high-tech company how his computer technology will someday help policymakers better manage the Earth’s resources.
Take the debate over chopping down virgin timber in the Northwest. It’s a mistake, Van Sant argues, to reduce the discussion to owls versus jobs. Instead, business and government should weigh quick profits against the long-term loss of natural resources. To do that, he says, they’ve got to move beyond political rhetoric.
“Words all just go back and forth,” Van Sant says. “This project is fundamentally conceived as a means of getting past [that].”
He is talking about the GeoSphere Project, his six-year effort to produce an easily accessible, scientifically accurate, interactive portrait of the Earth. His idea--the latest in a series of unusual experiments mixing art and science--is to give anyone with a computer modem the chance to visualize “fundamental facts” about the environment. Obscure but important facts, he notes, that now rarely circulate beyond the scientific community.
At the core of the project is a database in progress called the Global Visual Library. With a few clicks of the mouse, a user in a specially equipped room can tap into a graphic showing changes, for example, in the size of the African chimpanzee population. By overlaying pictures of deforestation in the same time period, the user can form a hypothesis: Chopping down trees has contributed to a decline in the number of chimps. Or perhaps someone wants to know what role weather patterns have had in shaping the cultures of nomadic peoples. Or how ice floes migrate.
Van Sant’s vision for the library embodies a great leap of faith: If real people can see the Earth’s condition unfold before their eyes, they can better react to such threats as overpopulation, ozone depletion and global warming. So far, his support group includes astronauts, scientists, the Smithsonian Institution and Vice President Al Gore, among other policymakers. NASA gave $50,000 in seed money.
“I think it’s a very exciting and useful way to help people,” says Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), a fan of the project. “I’d much rather have the people pushing Congress as a consequence of the people knowing more than the Congress knows.”
Van Sant puts it more succinctly: “Instead of being victims of history . . . we [can] gain back our power.”
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Despite the slumbering sheep dog, the floor paved in AstroTurf and the furniture patched with green duct tape, the GeoSphere headquarters gives off the vibe of a military nerve center. Half a dozen workers are spread out around the large main room, speaking on the phone in hushed voices, manning the computers.
Van Sant meets guests at a polished wooden table positioned near a gigantic globe. This imposing Earth is one of the project’s early accomplishments. Like Van Sant himself, it is as much about art as it is science.
Now 64, he got to this place in his life by way of Beverly Hills, where he grew up under the roof of a hard-working insurance salesman and a homemaker. Then came stints as a Marine in the Korean War and as a student at Stanford University and the Otis College of Art and Design. A fascination with line drawings and watercolors expanded into murals, architectural design and urban planning. By the 1970s, Van Sant was the lead architectural and art planner for the downtown Bunker Hill redevelopment project.
A favorite diversion of the time was putting art in the sky. One fall day in 1979, Van Sant had sent up his latest creation, a twisting centipede of a kite, when he bumped into a man on the Baja, Mexico, beach.
“That’s amazing,” the onlooker said. “Can I help?”
Thus began a friendship with Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman that would turn Van Sant’s art sharply toward the scientific.
The artist gave the physicist drawing lessons and, before he died in the mid-’80s, Feynman lent his expertise for a Van Sant creation: the world’s smallest drawing. It involved using the world’s largest scanning electronic microscope to burn a picture of the human eye into a grain of salt; the image was then recorded with an electron beam. The artist named it “Ryan’s Eye” for his baby son.
Van Sant had already explored the other extreme. In a project cooked up for the Los Angeles bicentennial, he and a crew set up mirrors in the shape of an eye across a 1 1/2-mile stretch of the Mojave Desert to overexpose sensors in a satellite passing overhead. The result was the world’s largest drawing.
The GeoSphere Project sprang from this growing passion for satellites and microscopic technology. Eight years ago, as Van Sant lay in bed with a serious eye infection resulting from a cornea transplant, he thought long and hard about some ideas he had unsuccessfully shopped around to government agencies: creating both a map of the Earth based on satellite imagery and a database of scientific information about the planet. By the time he recovered, Van Sant was convinced he could make his vision a reality.
Using savings and money from the sale of his Los Feliz home, he invested $500,000 in the fastest computer and the smartest programmers he could find. Along with artists and scientists, they worked night and day for 10 months out of a former cocaine den in Pasadena.
When Van Sant tapped him for the project, Jet Propulsion Laboratory programmer Lloyd Van Warren viewed it as a big errand--bulldozing pixels, as he puts it. But along the way, he came under Van Sant’s spell. He says he admired Van Sant’s refusal to sell the rights to GeoSphere when some big institutions came calling.
“Tom is there, up against the wall,” Warren says. “He lives there all the time. Sticking to your guns, doing the triangle leap and saying, ‘Yeah!’--and letting your enemy go over the cliff.”
Fueled by coffee, takeout Mexican food and Dodgers games piped in on a tinny radio, the team put together an enormous puzzle of images drawn from satellite data; each piece captured a 4-kilometer square of Earth. The resulting picture was a phenomenal hit, appearing in books and magazines, on coffee mugs, mouse pads, coasters and T-shirts. A worker at GeoSphere headquarters still keeps busy filling orders for the 6-year-old poster.
And Van Sant is still moved by the image’s popularity. “It’s not Elvis. It’s a picture of the Earth,” he says. “That’s interesting.”
On a shelf next to his cluttered desk is a note from Apollo 15 astronaut Jim Irwin: “Thank you for a new view of Earth.”
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That mission accomplished, Van Sant went about taking the satellite image of the Earth to the next phase: the Global Visual Library.
He assembled more technicians and programmers, and enlisted the help of such high-tech institutions and corporations as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Autometric Inc., Analytical Graphics and Planetary Visions, a British firm specializing in software that patches together satellite images. Their animation system allows users to “go everywhere and see everything, to understand and experience relationships” among the Earth’s systems, Van Sant says.
Early on, Van Sant decided to exclude “propaganda” from the library and rely instead on a variety of sources. A visualization of the history of the whale population, for instance, incorporates data from the Japanese fishing industry and from NASA, which monitors ocean currents and plankton levels.
Other contributors range from the Sierra Club to the U.S. Geological Survey to the United Nations Environmental Program. In the future, some information will be transmitted to users in “near real time,” Van Sant says, directly from the tracking source: seismic activity, commercial airline movement, naval data about ocean currents, wave heights, atmospheric conditions and temperatures.
For now, the library is couched in “Earth Situation Rooms”--places vaguely reminiscent of a NASA command center. Already, prototypes have been built in the Santa Monica headquarters, Japan, Brazil and Spain, and there are plans for two dozen more. Contract negotiations are underway with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo to install a Global Visual Library in a new interactive science exposition. And Van Sant would like to see a portable version on the floor of Congress, and on the desks of every CEO and schoolchild in the world.
Al Hibbs, a retired JPL scientist and the chairman of Van Sant’s nonprofit foundation, Eyes on Earth, calls the library “a hypothesis-making machine” and a “visual display of the workings of the world.”
Indeed, it offers a view of the planet as an organism. Before a user’s eyes, the North and South Poles grow and shrink, the colors of the Earth cycle from green to browns, and birds and whales migrate. Textures are revealed in stunning relief, from roiling clouds to flickering city lights to etched, hard surfaces of the ocean floor. Some of the views are sobering, such as the historic visualizations showing how the world’s native forests have been mowed down, how the hole in the ozone has grown, how major lakes have shrunk, and how the habitats of countless animals have been broken down into tiny pockets.
It’s a startling view that Van Sant says has been lacking in the linear world of books, and one that he believes could transform education.
“We don’t deliver an understanding of the total dynamic. . . . We just learn the particulars until the bell rings, and then you take that book and put it in your locker, and take out the book on the next subject as if reality were divided into compartments, which it isn’t. And so you wonder why kids drop out--because they can’t find meaning. Well, the most important kids in the world, the most important people in the world, are the ones who want to find meaning.”
To date, the GeoSphere Project has survived without advertising or formal public relations, living off the proceeds from the GeoSphere map--about $500,000 a year--and from donations to Eyes on Earth. As the organization pushes forward, it will seek further backing from private investors.
Already, Van Sant’s work brings a stream of curiosity-seekers, such as the young man from the high-tech company. And on another recent day, a couple of guys from a television network stop by. Once again, the artist describes his mission, and his listeners seem spellbound.
“I’m trying to get my whole head around the things we’ve been talking about today,” says one of the visitors. “It sounds like you’ve got this global view, you’ve got this huge pail of knowledge, and you’re trying to interrelate everything--am I right?”
“Everything,” Van Sant responds. “By the way, [the visual library] not only goes, in scale, from space to the surface of the Earth, but then it goes on down to viruses and genetics. It’s all a universal, total library for the 21st century, accessible by everyone. And it’s going to become that slowly or quickly, but it’s going to become that.”
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Tom Van Sant
Age: 64.
Background: Raised in Beverly Hills; now lives in Santa Monica.
Family: A son, Ryan, is 14.
Passions: Drawing, sculpting, bird- and animal-watching in the Sierra.
On the growing pressure to protect the Earth: “Increasing population. Decreasing resources. Depletion of the ozone. Increase of carbon dioxide. Global warming. The destruction of nature. These are the fundamental issues for the 21st century.”
On the positive force of technology: “There is no reason why electronic connections cannot permeate our culture, and there’s no reason why every school in the country shouldn’t have access to not only information but to complex systems such as those represented in the GeoSphere Project.”
On the trouble with the way we teach kids: “We don’t deliver to our readers’ synthesis. We only deliver compartmentalized analysis and ask for rote feedback for tests.”
