Valorizing the Sphere
Omnidirectional unveiling
After seeing me present at the Cosmopoetics symposium, the founders of the Société des arts technologiques invited David to give this keynote talk for their inaugural Symposium iX (Immersion・Experience). It resulted in a lengthy collaboration with the SAT and eventually the founding of Spherical.
From David Fideler's review:
In this brilliant and superbly illustrated 41-minute presentation, David McConville, President of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, uses the geometry of the sphere as a lens and speculum through which to visualize the relationships between humanity, worldview, culture, and the greater world in which we live.
Starting with the image of the sphere in religions and cosmology, McConville takes us on a historical and cultural voyage to the emergence of the spherical planetarium dome as a tool for envisioning our relationship to the world.
Drawing on the work of Buckminster Fuller, McConville addresses one of the key dilemmas and ironies of our time: Despite the fact that we are now altering the structure of the Earth on a planetary scale and every major ecosystem is in decline, due to hyperspecialization and the radical fragmentation of knowledge, most academic disciplines are powerless to address the kinds of systemic crises we now face.
Through the image of the sphere and its use as a tool for immersive data visualization, we are now able to make invisible relationships visible on a planetary scale.
As McConville beautifully illustrates, this provides a possibility “to transcend disciplinary boundaries to create true transdisciplinary discourse.”