Cyber-Space-Savers
Amid the cholla and prickly pear cactus of the Arizona high desert, far removed from city life, a 78-year-old Italian architect preaches about the evils of escaping from civilization.
If this sounds like a paradox, he’s already got you covered: This is the Paradox Seminar, hosted by Paolo Soleri, founder of an unusual community called Arcosanti.
For 50 years now, Soleri has been cultivating a novel union of architecture and ecology, which he terms Arcology. Using construction techniques he invented and without help from corporate backers, he’s managed to build a prototype city, featuring geometrically interesting, aesthetically simple, multiuse structures that let maximum sun in during winter and provide shade during summer.
And last week, a delegation of about 80 freethinking computer professionals came for a seminar, curious to explore just what all this might have to do with cyberspace.
“I had the vision of turning our digital culture loose on Arcosanti four years ago, and it’s taken me that long to get Paolo to trust me enough to let me do it,” said Michael Gosney, founder of the now-defunct digital art magazine Verbum and creator of the Bay Area’s “Digital Be-In” cyber-parties.
The plan worked out by Gosney and Soleri is for a group of “cyber-pioneers” to help with the construction of the newest component of Arcosanti, the Teilhard de Chardin Complex.
Chardin was a Jesuit priest who wrote about global consciousness in the first half of the 20th century, and he predicted that the next phase of evolution would take place in a realm of thought that he called the Noosphere. Some computer visionaries take the Noosphere to be the first articulation of cyberspace.
Soleri, a onetime disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright who built his first prototype city in Scottsdale, Ariz., in the 1960s, said he decided to sanction some form of on-site cross-pollination in response to his own growing concern “that computational systems were becoming increasingly sentient, while at the same time they had no soul.”
Certainly, the promised paradoxes--or odd juxtapositions, at least--were very much in evidence. The rainbow-colored legions of mostly San Francisco-based digital-effects artists, programmers, Web designers and other digerati fairly glowed against the earth-toned colors of Arcosanti.
Events of the first evening included a production in which Arcosanti residents, mostly young and idealistic laborers, retold Plato’s allegory of the cave, casting giant shadow images on a distant canyon wall.
The second evening culminated in the visitors’ launching a full-blown rave, complete with a light and sound show and a temporary Buddhist altar.
The discussion groups sometimes tended toward the surreal, with titles such as “‘Homo-Carbonis/Homo-Siliconis.” Participants such as quantum physicist Jack Sarfatti, bioengineer Charles Ostman and 3-D inventor Mark Pesce blithely voiced confidence that the emergence of some kind of self-aware silicon-based life was inevitable within the next few years.
And people who in many cases were making a very nice living from techno-capitalism listened earnestly to Soleri’s exhortations about the ecological depredations of the current economic system.
“The American Dream is going to be catastrophic in its physical aspects,” he lectured. “Once it becomes global, there will be 20 times the current stresses on the Earth. As usual with the humans, it has to get to the brink of disaster to get us to reconsider our lifestyle.”
Of course, the American Dream has in its way been very good to Paolo Soleri. He has a company that sells bells made with his unique techniques, and he charges for tours of the 800-acre site and for workshops. That and a few donations finance a $200,000-a-year construction budget.
Soleri sees the Paradox Project, which the Paradox Seminar is meant to initiate, as a new opportunity for his philosophy: that habitats should be built densely and efficiently in order to maximize social contact while limiting environmental impact.
“Miniaturization, our only hope for survival, demands an urban solution,” Soleri explained. The aim is to create “a city that works for the Earth.”
The dominant issue of the weekend was how construction--either in cyberspace or in real space--could use the small and the complex to provide alternatives that minimize the use of resources.
Indeed, Soleri’s theories of compact and complex communities tap into a vague but powerful belief among many technophiles that cyberspace can help create a more village-like environment, one where people live and work in the same place.
“I’m just tired of us working on creating what are essentially marketing materials for all these multinational corporate clients all the time. I got into this business because I thought I could make a difference,” said Eric Kalabac, an independent San Francisco digital artist and techno disc jockey. “Now I’m thinking maybe I can.”
There wasn’t any specific agreement on how to proceed, except to spend the rest of the year discussing the question on the Arcosanti Web site at https://www.arcosanti.org/paradox
Of course, not all the visitors were keen on one component of the proposed project--manual labor for five hours a day--and the nature of their role became a somewhat contentious topic in the end.
“We need to consider not only what Arcosanti has to offer us, a chance to get all sweaty, but also what we have to offer Arcosanti,” said computer scientist Erick Von Schweber. “Using cyberspace, we can see how Arcosanti scales and apply its principles to other environments. Of course, I don’t mind pouring a little concrete either,” he added.
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Freelance writer Lawrence Comras can be reached at axil@greenhome.com
