From Remote Stars: Recent Episodes
From Remote Stars
In 1968 the London, Ontario based artist Greg Curnoe walked into a bar.
He was wearing a bright yellow suit paired with an equally loud purple shirt. It was a bold look.
He had gone to the bar to listen to a man speak. A Futurist who seemed to appeal as much to the counterculture as he did to the establishment. An architect who, by that point in his career, had been described as the first poet of technology, a living genius and… a crackpot.
In Díaz’ first book The Experimenters, she looks at Black Mountain College, an iconic school in rural Appalachia where Fuller taught in the late 1940’s and first developed his signature dome structure.
Her forthcoming book, After Spaceship Earth delves further into Fuller and how his story can be woven into a broader critique of the concept of Total Design, in Contemporary Art.
In Kerri Sakamoto's novel Floating City, Fuller and his ideas are incorporated into a personal story of a first generation Japanese kid, named Frankie Hanesaka.
On this episode of From Remote Stars.
Constructing a Mythology.
The stories that we create and what they can tell us about ourselves.
On this episode of From Remote Stars. Buckminster Fuller's Spaceship earth. The beginning of the proto-environmentalist movement, the dawn of the atomic age, and where we are today.
By the time Fuller appeared in London he was already a household name throughout Canada. Fuller's iconic dome was the centrepiece of Montreal’s Expo 67 which would go on to be considered the most successful World’s fair of the 20th Century.
But Fuller wasn’t the only one gaining attention, the art scene in London was also having a moment in the late 60’s. Writing in Art in America magazine in 1969, critique Barry Lord called London, Ontario, “one of Canada’s four major art scenes,” saying the city was quote “younger than Montreal, livelier than Toronto, vying with Vancouver in variety and sheer quantity of output... in many ways the most important of the four.”
One evening in London, Ontario in 1968 Buckminster Fuller stood in front of an audience of artists and academics and delivered what he called “thinking out loud” - a sort of stream of consciousness lecture. One that touched on everything from the frequencies of chemical elements, to the human condition, to, very remote stars.