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| Acid Visions | |||
| American counterculture of the late 1960s was rich in new, universal ways of life that were based on specially developed models of perception, art, and architecture. For instance, Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes became blueprints for communal buildings far away from urban civilization and were also important inspirations for the intermedia movement in art. However, writings of the time show that these intermedia or expanded art approaches themselves were not free of all kinds of mysticism, which implicitly laid the groundwork for the dominant powers. In addition, the question remains of how the “acid visions” of the space age anticipated the free flow of global (capital) streams. | |||
| Felicity Scott |
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In December 1970 dome builder Hans Meyer interviewed Buckminster Fuller for Domebook, Lloyd Kahn’s edited manual, or “information net,” for do-it-yourself dome builders. As pointed out in an editorial note, Domebook had “intersected Fuller’s trajectory at various points,” and it now seemed imperative to address certain questions haunting the publication’s adoption of Fuller’s patented invention, the geodesic dome. The first was a growing recognition of the “critical conflict” between Fuller’s project of engaging the apparatus of mass production and the countercultural ethos motivating the use of domes as a technology for dropping out. If, as suggested by the widespread embrace of Domebook One by the counterculture, dome building initially seemed aligned with the aesthetic, economic, and geopolitical ambitions of hippie culture, there were already growing doubts among both Domebook’s readers and editors about the wisdom of its adoption (as a countertechnology for dwelling) by the time the second issue went into production. Meyer began the interview, however, by addressing the other question increasingly on the minds of those affiliated with the publication. How, as he put it, had Fuller “c[o]me about discovering geodesics and the great circle geometry[?]”[1]Fuller seems to have recognized the emergence of a certain disidentification just beginning to spread within the countercultural following he had carefully cultivated over the past half decade. “I’ll try to puzzle just how  and where I first began to think things in a geodesic way,” he began, clarifying that by “geodesics” he meant a form of perception characterized by a “total polyhedronal array, [a] surface array.” He then told the story of his childhood blindness. Without corrective lenses his vision had been confined to an array of “blurry colors,” producing an “enjoyment of color [that] was fantastically intense.” Lights at night, he continued, appeared as “a whole cluster of very tiny little lights,” a myriad of circular arrays that he believed to be unavailable to people of regular vision. It was in meditating upon this amorphous visual phenomenon that, he claimed, he had come to understand the patterns of triangulation that would later congeal into a structural logic. And by simply removing his glasses, he continued to have access to this phenomenon. If the story, as with other of Fuller’s narratives, had been repeated many times before, here its valence was strategically recast. “I think that [is] what the kids get with psychedelics,” he added.[2]The Domebook interview was not the first time Fuller had mobilized claims to affinities between his own “philosophy” and the activities of radical and countercultural groups. Indeed, many were ready to believe that the “doing-more-with-less,” one-world ideology of Fuller’s “revolution by design” was closely connected to the politics of antiwar protests, as well as to ecological and environmental movements. Even before Fuller claimed to enjoy both psychedelic vision and its mind-expanding consciousness, affiliations had been posited in the underground press. Interviewed for the East Village Other in 1967, Fuller was presented as “probably as hip to what it’s all about as any man alive today.” “Have you ever been to a MIND CIRCUS,” the interviewer inquired, “in a geodesic dome?”[3] This conjunction of Fuller’s structural prototype and psychedelic culture appeared, not by accident, in the context of Fuller’s ongoing attempts to reterritorialize dissident practices upon his own technocratic ideals. But importantly, and not unrelated to Fuller’s earlier attempts to capitalize on the energy of the counterculture, we find a symptomatic alliance, in the very nature of such practices, with new technological forces and new modalities of power. In the first instance, a residual functionalist (determinist) sensibility often attributed a “mind-altering” impact not only to psychedelic drugs but to environments in which, it was believed, the subjects’ senses would be “liberated” from the constraints of a normative physical and visual world just as their consciousness would be liberated from their ego. In recollections of encountering such environments, moreover, we often find claims to a strategic, even radical, role for the bodily occupation of a spectacular or, perhaps, postspectacular digital or electronic milieu. Indeed such environments provided potent training grounds for producing useful subjects for the postindustrial age. In the second instance, the “oceanic” aesthetic tropes of psychedelia—the fluid, aformal images, indeterminate spaces, and ambient sounds—were associated in accompanying literature not only with a desired overcoming of signification and its assumed impact upon the spatial, social, psychological, and disciplinary realms. Beyond these aesthetic and visual tropes, as we shall see, we find rhetoric operating at a geopolitical register—in claims to overcome national boundaries—that might give us pause. At stake then, in thinking through this slippage of registers and scales, is the question of whether the rapid commodification of amorphousness (think of disco) might also tell us something about the problematic aspects of the geopolitical claims common to both Fuller and the hippies. Expanded Arts In the winter of 1966 Jonas Mekas published a special issue of Film Culture dedicated to “Expanded Arts.” As he noted in May that year in his “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice, “Suddenly the intermedia shows are all over the town.”[4] Bringing film into an encounter with other media—from projected light and sound to architecture—these practices produced a certain loss of distinction, both disciplinary and spatiotemporal. George Maciunas included the Eameses’ multiscreen Glimpses of the USA from the 1959 Moscow World’s Fair in the “Expanded Arts Diagram” presented as part of the special issue. But most other featured instances of an expanded “environmental design” involved a distinctly psychedelic use of technology. For instance, the issue included “Triptape,” an interview with Richard Aldcroft, designer of the patented light-show technology, the “Infinity Machine.” “The perfect structure” to house Infinity Machines, Aldcroft explained, indicating an indebtedness to Fuller, would “consist of a dodecahedron with twelve sides and eleven projectors with eleven rear screens with a mirror . . . for the twelfth screen. Yes, to fill every screen with an evolving picture could be a wild, beautiful thing.”[5] Aldcroft went on to distinguish his motivation from that of Timothy Leary who, to his mind, had not addressed “what can really be done with LSD.” The main point, he explained, was not to take acid and drop out of society. Rather “society needs to be changed by the people who take LSD. Technologists need to take LSD and direct their consciousness into a program of reorganization.” By way of example, he turned to the future of housing. Refuting Maciunas’s “square” vision, Aldcroft’s housing would be geodesic but comprise a transparent geodesic sphere, not a dome. Moreover, it would “consist of hydraulic housing, not housing on earth but housing on water.” Heavy machinery—air conditioning, generators, water gathering and storage equipment—would be at the base of the unit, providing anchorage. If the unit was large enough, a nuclear generator might be included. “And you think this can all come about from heightened consciousness through LSD?” the interviewer inquired. “Yes, that’s right,” responded Aldcroft: “LSD can put the technologists onto the problem of human survival.” Engineers and designers could be turned on to such visions (and also it seems, to the dystopic underside of Fuller’s message) through coverage by the Underground Press Syndicate.[6]  The psychedelic shows of the multimedia collective USCO figured prominently in the same issue of Film Culture. The “Expanded Arts Bourse” advertised We Are All One, USCO’s multichannel road show (replete with VW Microbus) that used “up to four 16mm and two 8mm [film] projectors, four [slide] carousels, strobes and pulsing light units, light projection machines . . . and several sound channels.”[7] Writing for the New York Times, Grace Glueck referred to it as “a programmed pandemonium that seems accurately to reflect the urban U.S. milieu.”[8] This was a milieu conceived by USCO through the words of Marshall McLuhan. “[I]n the electronic age whose media substitute all-at-onceness for one-thing-at-a-timeness, the movement of information at approximately the speed of light has become by far the largest industry in the world. . . . Patterns of human association based on slower media have become overnight not only irrelevant and obsolete, but a threat to continued existence and sanity.”[9]We Are All One sent an avowedly McLuhanesque subject on a “literal and symbolic voyage” that aimed to simulate this spatiotemporal mutation. The show offered a space of sensory training, or perhaps reprogramming, that might produce, in USCO’s words, “a journey of this being, riding and fighting the waves from birth through love’s body, searching living currents, sampling peaks of illumination, holding on and letting go the experience of  time-space-death, finding potential rebirth in the consciousness WE ARE ALL ONE.”[10] Moreover, as reported by Life, at inspired moments the audiovisual components came together “to create a sensory overload that makes some viewers feel they are having LSD type hallucinations.”[11] Situated at the nexus of intermedia art, multiscreen environments, psychedelic visions, mysticism, religion, and a fascination with death, USCO were indeed, as reported from Holland, “beating the tribal drum of our new electronic environment.”[12]In his May 26, 1966, “Movie Journal,” Mekas noted that he often found himself asking “What are all these lights doing? What is the real meaning of the strobes?” The question remained on his mind, and a few weeks later he spoke with Steve Durkee, a member of USCO who was variously described as an architect, artist, engineer, and environmental designer, and who, as Mekas noted, was “responsible for much of the USCO show.” (Durkee had a number of relevant connections to the counterculture and dome building: he had staged a “Be-in” with Stewart Brand, then collaborating with USCO, a few years earlier and named Steve Baer’s zonahedral reworking of Fuller’s geodesics the “zome.”[13]) Responding to Mekas’s suggestion that the strobe “dramatizes the intermedia,” Durkee stressed, “Strobe is the digital trip. In other words, what the strobe is basically doing, it’s turning on and off, completely on and completely off,” something not possible with incandescent light flickering at sixty times per second. Again prompted by Mekas’s remark that “it represents . . . the point of death, or nothingness,” Durkee agreed: “that death thing is certainly part of it. The On and Off.”[14] Strobe, he went on, “creates a discontinuance,” later adding that it produced a feeling of the loss of “who you are—because all you see are fragments of yourself. It’s really like being in a movie . . . like movies becoming real.” Moreover, Durkee believed one could become acclimatized to that reality (or at least its mediation and modulation) through immersion in what he situated as a type of perceptual training: “electrical showers.”  Mekas and Durkee agreed that many people were turned off by strobes, that some even felt them to be “evil,” that others feared “something incoming.” This sense of menace was mentioned by the reviewer for Harper’s, to whom USCO “seem fully aware of the potential threat that lies in the sophisticated manipulation of ‘total environment’ ideas.”[15] But if they had recognized that forging such a “digital trip” might harbor a dark underside, this ceding of the self to its environmental machinations was repeatedly cast as a mode of escape from congealed forms of representation and extant forms of power. In Mekas’s words, strobe had the effect of “dissolving all the points of hard resistance, both of matter and mind[.] So that every reality that is here like a rock is being atomized.” Reiterating the transformative effect, he argued: “To me evil is, in art or life, only what keeps us rotating in one place like a record that gets stuck in the same groove. But the intermedia shows, the strobe opens us.”[16]The question of the ego and its overcoming permeates the literature on psychedelic culture. We see it, for instance, when Progressive Architecture reported (also in 1966) on the consciousness-expanding potential of psychedelics for architects in “LSD: A Design Tool?” California architect Eric Clough reported of his mescaline experience, “I lay down on the floor and began to melt into the environment. I felt as if I were a mass of protoplasmic jelly that was just creeping out into and infusing with everything around it.” He noticed at one point that “along with this melting of my general being, my ego was melting too. I visualized my ego as a head sticking up above the protoplasm, trying to preserve itself.” He laughed at this resistance, and “it just went plop and away I went.” Away, of course, into stereotypical grand narratives of the entire history of civilization and the sense of being “integrally a part of life.”[17] Indeed, the narrator explained, “visual sensations are often accompanied by a sense of oneness with the universe and a disappearance of the feeling of being separated from other people and the physical environment.”[18] “My ability to flow easily with life was enhanced,” Clough added, once what he termed “frictions” (which we might identify as history and politics) had been removed. When Jim Burns published the book Arthropods in 1971, he cast experimental practice as a refusal of the “ego-trip” architecture of “a Saarinen or a Le Corbusier or a Louis Kahn.” “The separations between art, science, technology, architecture, and everyday life,” he argued, “are beginning to appear as artificial boundaries and hence to disintegrate,” as would the “discrete” nature of the objects produced.[19] In his May 26, 1966 ,“Movie Journal,” Mekas articulated a crucial distinction between performances that retained a role for the ego and those producing a mystical sense of its overcoming through “oneness.” On one side was Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground’s performances at the Dom, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable or EPI.[20] Their strength, Mekas argued, “and where they differ from all the other intermedia shows and groups, is that they are dominated by the Ego.” Pointing to the “screeching, piercing personality pain” involved, it was, however, “the last stand of the Ego, before it either breaks down or goes to the other side.”[21] “At the other, almost opposite end,” Mekas continued, “is the show” and its search for “religious, mystical experience.” He returned to this characterization at the end of his column, noting that these shows included moments when “I feel I am witnessing the beginnings of new religions, that I find myself in religious, mystical environments. . . . The very people who come to these shows have all something of a religious bond among them.”[22] If both poles of this dialectic used strobes, one produced a hypercharged encounter, an assault upon the ego with that On/Off/On/Off; the other celebrated a type of ceding of the self to the environment experienced as “We Are All One.” The latter’s fluidity was “experienced” at multiple registers: the loss of distinction between media; the loss of demarcations between the self and the environment; the amorphous visual and psychological character of the psychedelic trip; and the melting of the self into a communal, religious, and mystical domain. This pseudomorphism was even more explicit in Mekas’s interview with another USCO member, Gerd Stern. Multiscreen environments, like LSD, were to offer a “way out of this world.” For Stern the secret logic of a “media experience,” characterized by the “instantaneous transmission of information” and a McLuhanesque integration of technology, held the key to the mystery of the new space-time continuum. “It’s in the rainbow and it’s in the sweep of the audio-oscillator and it’s in the visualization of the wave form as phosphor on the cathode ray tube that it becomes most apparent to me as mystical reality,” he explained. “The medium mix leads us into seeing something of what this power or energy does.”[23] The use of the word something is important here: for with respect to new forms of power then being articulated between such technology and extant institutional structures, a critical questioning of intermedia art’s possible modes of authority over the observer remained largely absent. Mekas had asked Stern why “there has been such a general trend toward media mixes?” When Stern responded with the suggestion that the “tools are really becoming available,” Mekas interjected that “this kind of research has been going on for at least ten years. Why suddenly all of this?” At stake for Stern was the production of an environment that simulated such time-space affinities, and he stressed on two occasions the role of Durkee. “The performances and exhibitions, the paintings, the lights, the projections, the environmental media-contact,” Stern explained, “it becomes a question of human beings sharing time, of making the material productions in this world into an environment in which this becomes feasible.” He added that in this computerized and networked “world of simultaneous operations,” traditional spatiotemporal distinctions, interpersonal hierarchies, and even modes of political practice had become obsolete. “If we can hang on for another decade, it’s not going to be the people marching in the streets for peace (although I think that’s beautiful), but these ideas and this movement in society which will make peace a possibility.”[24] Technology emerges, then, not as a force of historical consciousness but as a substitute for politics, a medium bearing yet another troubled promise of happiness. (USCO at the time was based in a converted church but planning to build a commune of geodesic domes.) Stern reiterated Mekas’s dialectic of intermedia. “I feel sorry for Andy Warhol,” he remarked, pointing to what he regarded as the loneliness and “great distance” among individuals within the EPI. “I see the same long hair and the same clothes and the same tools” but also “a tremendous fear too which I don’t see in our group.” Against such anomie he personified his own group’s dynamic, at the other pole, in the hug. “In our scene you see a person approaching the other person and you see people throwing their arms around each other.” He clarified that by his group he did not mean simply USCO but a larger phenomenon, exemplified by what was erroneously transcribed in Film Culture as “Draff City.” The reference was actually to Drop City, a dome-building commune founded in a goat pasture in Southern Colorado and constructed, as one commentator noted, not only of geodesic domes but of “acid visions.”[25]  Drop CityI have written in detail elsewhere about the founding and construction of Drop City and its relation to Fuller (and even to postmodernism).[26] Here I want to address the commune’s intermedia production. Drop City was typically presented as “totally removed from the traditional economic system” and as an experiment in life off the grid.[27] Yet despite the decidedly low-tech, crafty aesthetic of the earliest domes, this “postrevolutionary” environment was fully mediated, as demonstrated not only by the constant filming of dome construction and everyday life but by “total media environment intermix” droppings (a type of happening). Droppers were, avowedly, “information junkies”: they might have been unwashed, but they were still wired. Drop City was in fact conceived as a “large environmental sculpture”[28] in which domes served not only as a suitably strange architecture but also as one component of a multimedia project. As Richard Fairfield recalled, Droppers “advertised themselves as a community of artists who were innovating not only in the area of buildings and lifestyle, but also in a multimedia approach to art.”[29] Born into what Michael Shamberg termed “Media America,” Droppers were—as Fuller, too, liked to say—part of the first TV generation. The earliest descriptions of Drop City stressed this connection. As Peter Douthit explained in Arts Magazine in 1967: “Droppers make movies, black-and-white snow-wind poems, flickering TV beauties with all the subliminal delights of pulsing Coke ads, the crystal-molecular good sense of a dome going up [in] time lapse, and the grunting goodness of sex. We want TV videotape recorders and cameras. We want computers and miles of color film and elaborate cine cameras and hundreds of strobes and tape decks and amps and echo chambers and everything. We want millionaire patrons. We want to use everything, new, junk, good, bad, we want to be able to make limitless things. We need the most up-to-date equipment in the world to make our things. We want an atomic reactor.”[30] Thus, to reiterate, withdrawal from mainstream America did not entail rejecting the electronic milieu but was, rather, an attempt to bring the outer limits of industrial society into alternate relations with its emerging informatic counterpart.In August 1967, just a little over two years after the founding of the commune, a reporter from the Denver Post arrived to do a story on the Droppers. By this point a number of domes had been constructed, including a fifteen-foot-diameter expanded dodecahedron; nineteen-, twenty-one-, and twenty-three-foot-diameter two-frequency geodesic domes; and two zomes designed by Steve Baer, the first in the shape of a garnet crystal and the second a triple-fused rhombic-icosa-dodecahedron comprising three interlocking thirty-four-foot zomes. But what Clard Svenson and the other Droppers were then working  on was a larger geodesic dome to house a “theater for electronic psychedelics.” This, they explained, was “a relatively new art form that’s getting its first big exposure at Expo 67 in Montreal.” Svenson stressed, however, that the “World’s Fair exhibits” were merely “a mild form of the media.” Their version was to be “a much more intense experience. On the sides and ceilings of the new geodesic dome, he explained, electronic psychedelics will be produced by strobe lights flashing on revolving paintings, by many films projected simultaneously and by sound speakers scattered throughout.”[31]Wryly presented as a substitute for biochemical transportation, the aim was, as reported in the Denver Post, “to immerse the viewer in a total environment, resulting in strange, hypnotic effects on the mind. ‘It puts you inside of it.’ Svenson explains. ‘You can get right into a painting instead of looking at it from the outside.’ Hopefully, the psychedelic experience,” the reporter added, “removes the viewer from his conditioned norms and [moves him] more toward spiritual enlightenment.”[32] Prior to the completion of this environment, Svenson had been experimenting with painting. As described by commune member Peter Rabbit[33]: “More than anyone else he is responsible for the Drop City Spatial Paradox Painting, called the Ultimate—the best group work I’ve ever seen . . . A Five people painting, a spinning spherical disc almost six feet in diameter with strobes on it. You can make it stand still, move slowly forward or backward, all the time pulsing. It’s a mind blow.”[34] Elsewhere described as a “circular geodesic structure,” the “Ultimate” was a “painting to walk up the stairs into and lose your mind by.”[35] In 1971 Peter Rabbit published his memoirs of the by then already defunct Drop City  commune. “Something happened in the United States about ten years ago when large numbers of people got into consciousness-expanding drugs,” the book begins. “These nova dope fiends have a recognition in common, that All is One, that it’s all the same one thing no matter how you look at it.”[36] Armed with this recognition, the challenge (again) had been to create an appropriate environment. But the Droppers’ environment offered a perhaps less sublimated relation (even than USCO) to what Sigmund Freud had earlier characterized as an underlying death drive, including an instinct of aggression that in both culture and the individual remained in an unrelenting conflict with eros. Recalling his first encounter with the Droppers, who had come to Dallas in 1966, Rabbit invoked the distinctly dystopian aspect to this environmental production. The Droppers, he wrote, “had far-out films to show, they talked about far-out new drugs, they had THE BEING BAG, they knew about droppings. So we set it up to do a Dropping in Dallas. We called it Armageddon—The Doomsday Gig, had invitations printed and mailed out, made weird da-glo [sic] posters, got a bunch of very strange people to come together in that place.”[37] Amid dancing, wailing, strobes, and with dropper films and slides flickering over painted walls, Armageddon included a Doomsday Address that was greeted with shouts of “Faster, Grover, faster! It’s coming, Grover, faster! Doomsday!”[38] Rabbit was hooked and with his girlfriend, renamed Poly Ester, joined the migration to Drop City.The American counterculture, Fuller often stated, was born into “a transoceanic, air-traveling world,” raised by “the third parent—television,” and witness to such technological feats as the Russians’ unmanned rocket photographing the far side of the moon (age 13) and the discovery of the DNA genetic code (age 17). It was a generation confronted not only with the utopian prospects but also with the dystopian end point of the nation’s technological advancement. The atom bomb, in Fuller’s words, was “their birthmark.”[39] And the “Doomsday Gig,” as with “We Are All One,” seems to harbor in that opening out of the subject to intermedia environments a sort of adversarial structure turned inward onto the ego as though in the manner of some sort of penance. In the opening pages of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud noted the troubling nature of his friend Romain Rolland’s identification of religion with “a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic.’” Noting that he himself did not participate in such a “feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole,” Freud sought a psychoanalytic explanation of what he regarded as a crisis in the demarcation of the ego and the external world.[40] He conceded that beyond the nonpathological situation of two people in love, perhaps such a primordial oceanic feeling might coexist in some individuals as a counterpart to a mature “ego-feeling.” But rather than accepting it as religious, he recast it as a symptom of regression to “infantile helplessness,” a defense against suffering that in addition to the “mass delusion” of religion might manifest in other pleasures such as art or even eroticism. If civilization was supposed to protect man from the destructive forces of nature through advances in science and technology, just as it would protect one man from the “brute force” of another through notions of justice and of rights, even in the late 1920s it was evident to Freud that something had gone awry. And to come back to the question of love, Freud recognized a particular pathology in the “universal love of mankind and the world.” If often attributed the highest ethical value, such love of all mankind was in fact a problematic fiction of religion: like the impossible commandment “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (and what he posited to be essentially equivalent, “love thine enemies”), such claims to oceanic feelings, in their eradication of a notion of enmity, operated not as the welcoming of strangers but at the expense of politics. It did not, Freud recognized, constitute an ethical response but served to undermine both ethical and political encounters that are premised on self-conscious decisions.  SpaceIn 1971 Michael Shamberg remarked, “It’s ironic that NASA, probably the greatest government agency produced by America, has killed patriotism. National boundaries are simply not a motivating image when we have photos of the Whole Earth.”[41] Gene Youngblood, author of Expanded Cinema, made a related remark in his “Intermedia” column for the Los Angeles Free Press the previous year: “The more people think in global terms,” he argued with distinct techno-euphoria, “the less effective is the sovereign nation state. Support the space program.”[42] Architectural critic C. Ray Smith would also note that in the 1960s the “space age rocketed us into a revolutionary new scale.” One’s fellow man was seen “not only face to face . . . but also at an interplanetary distance,” adding: “Distances, time slices, and dimensions have dwindled, and vision, imagination, and physical scale have expanded to cosmic proportions.”[43] We find in such delirious claims to a new geopolitics not only overt claims to the elimination of borders (which, in these cases, far from sponsoring a new cosmopolitics simply reiterated the machinations of the military-industrial logic of an emerging empire) but the covert structure of a loss of historical and political consciousness. This was a move familiar from Fuller and equally oblivious to the mysticism standing in for relations of power. NASA had in fact served the United States all too well. “We had known all along that the earth was round and surrounded by a transparent blanket of air,” architect Craig Hodgetts observed. But, he continued, “it took that portrait of a tiny, radiant earth, somehow nobly alone in the vastness of space to fully realize the awful corollary of Adlai Stevenson’s remark to the U.N. that we stand together, passengers on a little space-ship, dependent on its vulnerable resources of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and I will say, the love we bestow on  our fragile craft.”[44] Resonating with Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth of 1969, here the ideology of nature had come to replace consciousness of the Vietnam War.[45]Like many other writers from that moment, C. Ray Smith would seamlessly connect NASA’s 1967 image of the whole earth not only with McLuhan’s notion of an interconnected “global village” and the new environmental consciousness but with intermedia practices and psychedelic drugs. Without such acid visions, Smith insisted, “architects would not have portrayed the same multicolored and ambiguous images of their new visions of space,” because it was those experiences that “were adapted to ‘psychedelic’ interior and graphic designs, resulting in nebulous wavy lines, ambiguous forms and textures, and flashing, pulsing light schemes.”[46] 1967 was also the year in which Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle first appeared, offering a distinct but equally haunting image of totalization. Thus, on the one hand, we have the image of an interconnected world ecology and, on the other, but quite in alignment, what Jonathan Crary has termed an “electronic substitute for geography.”[47] The nonassociational, oceanic, and antirepresentational (or postsemantic) claims of “acid vision” (whether mediated by information technology or LSD) would thus appear as a provocative dialectical counterpart to what Debord recognized as the congealed logic of spectacle culture and its media—a congealing that also operated in Fuller’s own “acid vision.” And this immediately raises the question of whether we can trace distinctions in how contemporary aesthetic practices responded to the emergent technologies and reorganization of this “global system of domination”—whether they forged antispectacular strategies or efficient diagrams of a transformation in that system’s very logic. Despite being haunted by the endgames of the Cold War, Drop City’s end would not be the result of nuclear catastrophe but of its inscription into the media. Toward the end of his memoirs, Peter Rabbit concedes his own role in bringing “the community down” by inciting the hordes. “We gotta get out there and hustle, man . . . we gotta get some publicity so people will lay bread on us—Time, Art News, The Astrodome, color TV—we gotta get it on, man.”[48] And he succeeded in capturing media attention to the point where, as he put it, “we got lost in a reflected image of ourselves. We were making a big splash.” But if Drop City functioned all too effectively within “Media America,” with its experimental domes serving to promote Fuller’s invention to the counterculture, the commune’s ambition had been quite distinct: it had aimed to articulate a dissident and political refusal of American, and hence global, capitalism. Although domes are “Not Quite Architecture,” to cite Reyner Banham’s formulation, such alternative critiques of architecture and urbanism, which functioned at the nexus of spectacle and use, raise the question not of how architecture might escape from this technological condition (an impossible and not entirely progressive ideal) but of what sort of ethical and political strategies might remain open as modes of encounter with it. These historical practices point to the danger not only of mysticism but also of an unwitting integration into contemporary articulations of geopolitics and digital tools. I stress “unwitting” to distinguish modes of experimentation from the savvy, even self-conscious strategies of uncritical integration that gave rise to, among other recent events in architecture, the “Bilbao Effect.”[49] |
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| The research was first presented in April 2005 at Architecture between Spectacle and Use, a conference at the Clark Art Institute organized by Anthony Vidler, and I would like to thank him, as well as Michael Ann Holly and the Clark Art Institute. I would also like to thank Gerd Stern for his kind assistance with USCO images. | |||||||
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| Felicity D. Scott is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Scott is also a founding co-editor of Grey Room. | |||||||
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Hans Meyer, “Interview R. Buckminster Fuller,” Domebook Two (May 1971), p. 90. |
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| 2 | |||||||
Ibid. This phenomenon was hardly far from Fuller’s usual field of interest; LSD experimentation had, of course, recently been a legitimate field of military science. |
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| 3 | |||||||
R. Buckminster Fuller interviewed by East Village Other, “On the Spaceship Earth,” East Village Other, (November 1–5, 1967), pp, 7–8. |
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| 4 | |||||||
Jonas Mekas, “May 26, 1966,” in “Movie Journals by Jonas Mekas as They Appeared in the Village Voice, Subject: Expanded Cinema,” Film Culture 43 (Winter 1966), p. 12. |
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| 5 | |||||||
Gordon Ball, “Triptape: An Interview with Richard Aldcroft,” Film Culture 43 (Winter 1966), p. 4. |
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| 6 | |||||||
Maciunas responded in an anonymous editorial note, pointing out inefficiencies of the floating sphere scheme, from the problem of circular geometries to the added costs of building in the sea and the difficulties of connecting to infrastructure. “This scheme, if inspired by LSD,” he retorted, “should be the best argument why engineers should not take LSD.” Editors Note, Film Culture 43 (Winter 1966), p. 5. |
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| 7 | |||||||
USCO, “We Are All One,” in “Expanded Arts Bourse,” in Film Culture 43 (Winter 1966), p. 9. |
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| 8 | |||||||
Grace Glueck, “A Little ‘Be-In’ Goes a Long Way,” New York Times, May 16, 1966, p. D20. |
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| 9 | |||||||
Cited in USCO, “We Are All One,” p. 9. No source indicated. |
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| 10 | |||||||
Ibid. |
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| 11 | |||||||
“Psychedelic Art: From LSD and a Fascination with Mind-expanding Visions Comes the Drugless Trip,” Life, September 9, 1966, p. 65. Cited in USCO, “We Are All One,” p. 9. |
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| 12 | |||||||
Kunst Licht Kunst (Eindhoven, 1966). Cited in USCO, “We Are All One,” p. 10. |
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| 13 | |||||||
See Steve Baer, Dome Cookbook (Coralles, N.M., 1968). |
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| 14 | |||||||
Jonas Mekas, “June 16, 1966,” in “Movie Journals by Jonas Mekas,” Film Culture 43 (Winter |
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| 15 | |||||||
Robert Kotlowitz, “Performing Arts: Long Island—The World of Murray K,” Harper’s Magazine (July 1966), p. 100. |
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| 16 | |||||||
Mekas, “June 16, 1966,” p. 12. |
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| 17 | |||||||
“LSD: A Design Tool?” Progressive Architecture 47 (August 1966), pp. 150, 151. |
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| 18 | |||||||
Ibid., p. 147. |
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| 19 | |||||||
Jim Burns, Arthropods: New Design Futures (New York, 1972), pp. 7 and 8, |
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| 20 | |||||||
For an important and groundbreaking reading of the EPI and the politics of intermedia, see |
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| 21 | |||||||
Mekas, “May 26, 1966,” p. 12. Later in the column Mekas reiterated this slightly differently: “At the Plastic Inevitables, however, the dance floor and the stage are charged with the electricity of a dramatic break just before the dawn. There is a cry of an emptiness, with ugly stuff oozing out—just before the dawn.” |
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| 22 | |||||||
Ibid. |
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| 23 | |||||||
Jonas Mekas, “USCO: Interview with Gerd Stern,” Film Culture 43 (Winter 1966), p. 3. |
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| 24 | |||||||
Ibid. Stern had earlier remarked of USCO’s hybrid environmental intermedia work that “we try to merge all the channels, make them yield to each other, and go in and go out,” also stressing the importance of titling their current work “We Are All One.” |
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| 25 | |||||||
“Drop City Revisited,” in Lloyd Kahn, ed., Shelter (Bolinas, Calif., 1973), p. 118. |
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| 26 | |||||||
This was the subject of my “End Games and Outer Limits,” presented as a keynote lecture at The 1970s: Designing Futures, Community and Technology in Architecture and Urban Design, University of Melbourne, |
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| 27 | |||||||
Morgan Lawhon, “Work, Thrift, Artistic Creativity,” Denver Post, August 6, 1967, p. D33. |
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| 28 | |||||||
Bill Voyd, “Funk Architecture,” in Paul Oliver, ed., Shelter and Society (New York, 1969), p. 156. “Droppers come in all sizes, shapes, colors,” noted Albin Wagner, “painters, writers, architects, panhandlers, film-makers, unclassifiables. . . . But we do all have this in common—whatever art we produce is not separated from our lives.” Albin Wagner, “Drop City: A Total Living Environment,” reprinted in Jesse Kornbluth, ed., Notes from the New Underground (New York, 1968), p. 233–34. |
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| 29 | |||||||
Richard Fairfield, Communes USA: A Personal Tour (Baltimore, 1972), pp. 203–4. |
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| 30 | |||||||
Peter L. Douthit, “Drop City: A Report from the Energy Center,” Arts Magazine 41 (1967), p. 50. |
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| 31 | |||||||
Lawhon, “Work, Thrift, Artistic Creativity,” p. D45. |
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| 32 | |||||||
Ibid. |
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| 33 | |||||||
Eds.: Artist’s name of Peter Douthit. |
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| 34 | |||||||
Peter Rabbit, Drop City (New York, 1971), p. 54. |
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| 35 | |||||||
Wagner, “Drop City,” p. 234. |
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| 36 | |||||||
Rabbit, Drop City, preface, np.; emphasis in original. |
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| 37 | |||||||
Ibid., p. 12. |
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| 38 | |||||||
Ibid., p. 14. |
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| 39 | |||||||
R. Buckminster Fuller, “Utopia or Oblivion,” in Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (New York, 1969), pp. 268–69. The “ages” attributed to the “TV generation” are from Fuller, as set out in this and other writings. |
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| 40 | |||||||
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York, 1961), pp. 11–12. |
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| 41 | |||||||
Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla Television (New York, 1971), p. 3n. |
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| 42 | |||||||
Gene Youngblood, “Pinneals and Pulsars,” Los Angeles Free Press, February 13, 1970, p. 33. |
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| 43 | |||||||
C. Ray Smith, Supermannerism: New Attitudes in Post-Modern Architecture (New York, 1977), p. 1. |
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| 44 | |||||||
Ibid., p. 2. |
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| 45 | |||||||
See R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale, Ill., 1969). Although the ecological movement was not, of course, in itself regressive, a look through the pages of underground papers suggests it does seem to have displaced the preeminence of civil rights and protest movements in many countercultural discourses and was soon picked up by the establishment as a palliative. This is argued, in more detail, in my forthcoming Architecture or Techno-utopia. See also Leo Marx, “American Institutions and the Ecological Ideal,” in Gyorgy Kepes, ed., Arts of the Environment (New York, 1972), pp. 78–97. |
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| 46 | |||||||
Smith, Supermannerism, p. 10. Smith, according to a letter to P/A, had “passed the acid test” with his space-expanding projection of the Guggenheim dome within his apartment. Rodney Pease, “The Acid Test,” in “Views” in Progressive Architecture (December 1968), p. 6. |
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| 47 | |||||||
See Jonathan Crary, “Eclipse of the Spectacle,” in Brian Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York, 1984), p. 286. |
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| 48 | |||||||
Rabbit, Drop City, p. 147. |
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| 49 | |||||||
Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum similarly mobilized the media on account of its |
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