3.3.1 Within the crisis times immediately ahead ­ into which we have already entered ­ the computer is soon to respond: "We must integrate the world's electrical-energy networks. (Fuller, 1981, pg. xxxi)

3.3.2 In 1964 the United States Information Agency asked Fuller to consider designing a building and an exhibition that might be adopted as the United States entry in the Montreal World's Fair in 1967, later know as "Expo '67." The rejected exhibition proposal was based on Fuller's conviction of "society's subconsciously established confidence in the computerıs reliability upon vital, therefore undeniable, behaviour facts." He envisioned in the basement of a building similar to the one realised for Expo '67 an extraordinary computer facility that would house a one-hundred foot miniature diameter earth‹the Geoscope. The Geoscope was conceived as a mechanism for blurring science and art. The original promotion of the project calls on the hybrid figure in the "scientist/artist" to reconceptualise the future. The Geoscope was one of the first attempts to transform the communication networks into an artwork.

3.3.3 Initially conceived in 1950, the Geoscope idea kept surfacing in Fuller's writings, and a few model prototypes were constructed, notably in Cornell and Nottingham, but it never was fully realised. Fuller embarks on using "TEL" by designing the Geoscope, envisioned as a total information-integrating medium. Essentially it was conceived as a two-hundred-foot diameter miniature earth with ten million electric light bulbs, one for each two square inches, evenly covering the sphere's entire surface. Hooked up to a computer, it would be updating information regarding the planet earth, floating in space, one-half a mile away from the United Nations building. In essence, it was envisioned as an omni-directional spherical high resolution television/satellite.

3.3.4 Fuller promotes the Geoscope in 1961 at the sixth congress of the International Union of Architects (IUA) in London, arguing that architectural schools around the world should study how to "render" the total resources of the world. (Wigley, 1997. pg. 17.16) He proposes two possible sites to the IUA: to be moved around and installed as a central focus in any city which is hosting the Olympic Games, or else permanently suspended on triangulated wires over Blackwellıs ledge, a set of rocks directly opposite the United Nations headquarters in New York. Elevators would lift people into the centre of the Geoscope where they could witness the presentation of stars, satellites, earthquakes, economic, demographic, and sociological displays. U Thant, the secretary general at the time, was excited about the idea, and he invited all ambassadors to the UN to attend. It was an "omni-world-around, electromagnetically-triangulated, aerial-photo-mapped, latitute-longitude-coordinated, geographical data object that never came to be." (Fuller, 1981, pg. 183)

3.3.5 McHale films the dynamic trends in human population since 4000 BC. at thirty years per second against the Dymaxion map, arguing that ideally the data ought to be electronically recorded and retransmitted by precisely mapping it to co-ordinates on the triangular surface on which it is displayed, thereby enabling his small Geoscope to be linked on-line to similar ones in schools around the world. Fuller and McHale end up focusing on such technologies of representation, studying multi-projection devices, flat- screen data displays, triangular-faced television tubes, new kinds of photography, multi-slide machines, microfilm, eight-millimetre cinema units, videotape mechanisms for film or data storage, and so on. They deploy state-of-the-art image making, while dreaming of a two-hundred foot version that would be made possible by much more advanced forms of computer display. (Wigley, 1997, pg. 17.23) [top]