As someone born and raised in a single family home with a trim lawn in the white suburbs of Northeast Ohio, each square mile of land framed by churches, I am fascinated with alternative methods of living. I have always loved the idea of packing up all I could need in a backpack or two and setting off for an unknown wilderness to create a life free from the restrictive and singular timelines of middle America. I wanted the Midwestern familiarity of a loving family and supportive community without the white picket fences or respectability politics, without the blue collars passed down from each generation.
My hunger for escapism has been satisfied in some respects. I've been fortunate enough to go abroad -alone and with my family- and live in an energetic city for my college years. This past summer, I spent three months living with friends in San Diego, which felt as foreign to me as another country entirely. We traveled to Santa Barbara for a weekend to stay with friends and I fell in love- with the landscape, the people, the ocean, and the lifestyle. I saw for the first time in person a geodesic co-op living space, complete with its own vegetable garden and laundry gently air-drying in the coastal breeze, and I haven't been able to get it off my mind since.
I don't know if my life is just one long serendipitous chain of events, but this brings me to a book I've had sitting in my Amazon wishlist for much too long: Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. I forget how or why I stumbled upon this book, but I remember flipping through it in a bookstore after being drawn in by the cover, a dull goldenrod with a photo of Habitat 67 -a geodesic dome created by Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao- up in flames at the World's Fair in Montreal.
"Hippie modernism," I realized, was the word I'd been looking for to describe my aesthetic and personal interests in alternative, sustainable living methods all along. After coming across Spatial Agency and reading more about Hippie Modernism, and watching the Walker teaser, I decided to narrow down my video piece to the man who started it all: Buckminster Fuller, the creator of the geodesic dome.
I watched a documentary from 1974 entitled The World of Buckminster Fuller, which was an extraordinary dive into his thought process and inspirations. I'm inspired by his unapologetic attitude and desire to create and design for the betterment of humanity. He's able to be inspired by the most grandiose ideas of space and the universe, but also the tiniest details such as an angle or a line.
For my video, I pulled inspiration from the quotes I chose about children, systems for creation, and doing more with less, as well as the end bite about his signature "Spaceship Earth" mantra. I used footage from the documentary, archival footage from the World's Fair, archival footage of schoolchildren in the 70s, and finally, footage shot by members of the experimental DomeCity in Colorado, a commune inspired by Buckminster Fuller's ethos and creations. I wanted to create something poetic out of the musings of an extremely intelligent architect.
The middle shape -maybe the most important element- is an outline of Fuller's Dymaxion Projection, "the only flat map of the entire surface of the Earth which reveals our planet as one island in one ocean, without any visually obvious distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the land areas, and without splitting any continents." I wanted to use the literal image of the projection he created as a way to illustrate this tension between the two-dimensional (theory, discourse, hypothesis) and three-dimensional (reality, life, biology).
I'm happy with this overall but I think I'd like to do another iteration using more geometric shape overlays in the future, and rely less on archival footage.