Paolo Soleri's Prototype Arcology in the Arizona Desert
Friday through Sunday
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FRIDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER
5:00pm-8:00pm
8:00pm-10:00pm Welcome: Ron Anastasia & Michael Gosney (Conference Co-Directors) Keynote Speakers: Erik Davis & Marcos Novak, AIA Erik is a culture critic who lectures internationally on technology and cyberculture. He is the author of the recently published "TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information," and has written for The Village Voice, Wired, Rolling Stone, Gnosis, and The Nation. Marcos is an architect, artist, composer, and theorist investigating actual, virtual and mutant intelligent environments. He is currently Visiting Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA and Founding Director of the RealityLab and the Advanced Design Research Program at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. "A turning is in the air. Slowly, tentatively, a 'network path' arises from the midst of yearning and confusion, a multifaceted but integral mode of spirit that might humanely and sensibly navigate the technological house of mirrors without losing the resonance of ancient ways or the ability to slice through the greed, hate, and delusion that human life courts." - Erik Davis, in "TechGnosis," 1999 "Ground Zero: As yesterday's speculations about cyberspace are confronted with today's implementation of a culture of virtuality, there is a need for critical discourse on the space and content of the new public realm. Digital communities are altering our very conceptions of space. The physical and the virtual embrace each other ever more tightly, contaminating one another with conceptions and practices that are sometimes vestigial, sometimes revolutionary, and always transformative. In the process, entire disciplines and institutions are swallowed whole and disappear while others transmutate into new formations whose impact we have barely begun to chart, let alone understand." - Marcos Novak, 1997 *** PLENARY SESSIONS *** SATURDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER
7:00am-8:45am Breakfast
Session #1) 9:00am-9:30am Paradox II is an inquiry into the integration of cyberspace, virtual reality, and habitat; in the context of Teilhard de Chardin's hypothesis re the formation of the Noosphere as a critical stage in human evolution. "The Noosphere is finally nothing less than the manifestation of a particular kind of super-Brain, capable of attaining mastery over some super-sphere in the universe and in the realm of thought. ... Something is purposefully stirring, as in a living being. No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 1947
Moderators: Conference Co-Directors:
Ron Anastasia (Coordinator of Arcosanti Paradox Project) & Michael Gosney (Member of Cosanti Board of Trustees, President of SF
multimedia firms Verbum Inc. and Radio-V.com, Director of the annual "Digital Be-In" in
San Franciso for past 10 years)
Panel Members (Conference Co-Sponsors): Sam DiGangi, Ph.D.
(Director, Instruction Support Group, ASU); Mark Henderson, Ph.D. (Director, School of
Engineering, Arizona State University); Richard Loveless, Ph.D. (Director, Institute for
Studies in the Arts, ASU); Ron McCoy, AIA (Director, School of Architecture, ASU);
Mel Roman, Ph.D. (Chairman of Cosanti
Foundation); Paolo Soleri, Ph.D. (Founder/Designer of Arcosanti).
Session #2) 9:30am-11:30am
An update on Teilhard de Chardin's vision of the cosmic significance of human
evolution, with specific reference to the role of computer and information technologies
in the creation of a new planetary culture.
"I believe that what is now being shaped in the bosom
of planetised humanity is essentially a rebounding of evolution upon itself.
... Who can say whither, coiled back
upon our own organism, our combined knowledge of the atom, of hormones,
of the cell and the laws of heredity will take us? Who can say what forces may
be released, what
radiations, what new arrangements never hitherto attempted by Nature, what
formidable powers we may henceforth be able to use, for the first time in the
history of the world?
This is Life setting out upon a second adventure from the springboard it
established when it created humankind." -
Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin, 1947 Moderators: Ron Anastasia & Michael
Gosney
Panel Members: Jennifer Cobb (Theologian/Teilhard
de Chardin specialist, Hi-tech consultant, author of "Cybergrace: The Search for God in the Digital World"),
Erik Davis (see Keynote), Mark Pesce (Internet visionary, co-inventor
of VRML-the Virtual Reality
Modeling Language, Director USC Cinema-Television), Paolo Soleri (see Session
#1)
11:30am-12:45pm Lunch
Session #3) 1:00pm-3:00pm Transarchitecture explores the
relationship between the real and the virtual by closing the normally
one-way feedback loop between architectural models in virtual space
and physical buildings in 3-space. This is accomplished via "sensors and effectors" built
into the fabric of the 3-space buildings which feed information back into
their virtual simulations.
"Paolo's ideas about the physical city are as
pertinent as ever. However, his ideas were never just about the built -
there is a much larger intellectual and philosophical
ambition at work here, ... . In addition to the physical arcologies, Paolo's
ideas must be applied to the the virtual world we are building. I am not
speaking of making
walkthroughs of potential physical arcologies, though this too is necessary,
I am proposing that the principles that guide the design of the physical
be brought to bear on
the design of the virtual. ..."
- Marcos
Novak, personal communication, 1998
Moderator: Marcos Novak is a cofounder and leading spokesperson for the new field of
Transarchitecture (see Keynote).
Panel Members: Peter Anders (Founder
and Director of MindSpace.net, an online information resource and community
for cyberspace designers, author of "Envisioning Cyberspace");
Michael Dobry (Director, Technology & Science, Southern California Institute
of Architecture), Steven Perrella (founder, Hypersurface Systems, Inc.)
3:00pm-3:30pm Coffee Break (will be served in amphitheatre)
Session #4) 3:30pm-5:30pm
An inquiry into Paolo Soleri's "Six Paradoxes of the Silicon Cyberspace Revolution."
Paolo has summarized the issues that led him to found Arcosanti's Paradox Project in
1996, in the following "Six Paradoxes."
"It is a paradox:
2. that Homo Carbonis might be engaged in self-extinction via the Homo Siliconis he
is inventing, a biotechnology reaching back millions of years made fearfully tragic by
the World Wide Web.
3. that an optimized communication/information technology may generate a planetary
hermitage engaged in a virtual reality and a technology promoting a hyper-segregated Homo
Sapiens.
4. that a technology of learning via information can very easily turn into a
technology of data inflation, constipation of information and mindless pernicious gossip
causing a sclerosis of mind.
5. that a democratic technology
might engender a split between the "haves" and the
"have nots," a split of unprecedented cruelty.
6. that a fundamentally democratic
technology, the World Wide Web, might cause a Luddite revolt against
technology and its overpowering presence, a technocracy."
Moderators:Ron Anastasia, Gilbert
Levin, Ph.D. (Professor of epidemiology and social medicine and of
psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, author of two books
which use computer simulation to analyze health and mental health policies,
and an editor of "Computers in Psychiatry/Psychology."); Mel Roman (see Session
#1)
Panel Members: Jennifer Cobb (see Session #2), Erik Davis (see Keynote), Mark Pesce (see
Session #2), Jonathan Schull, Ph.D. (Former Haverford College Assoc. Professor of
Biological Psychology researching the intelligence of evolving systems, President of
SoftLock Services Inc., Co-Founder of Downtown Anywhere Inc.), Paolo Soleri (see Session
#1)
5:30pm-7:30pm Dinner
Experiential Events: 8:00pm-1:00am SUNDAY, 26 SEPTEMBER
7:00am-9:30am Breakfast
Session #5) 9:45am-11:45am
Does the integration of cyberspace and habitat offer a critical synergy between the
disembodied global connections and resources of cyberspace and VR with, e.g., arcology's
emphasis on physical location, face-to-face community, and daily contact with Nature?
" The city gave us civilization because of its
coherence with the evolutionary drift. The demise of the city will be the
breakup of civilization and the falling away from the
thrust of evolution. This devolution promises intense planetary suffering,
a suffering the Noosphere must nobly resist and reject."
- Paolo Soleri
Moderators: Michael Gosney & Ron
McCoy (Director of ASU School of Architecture)
Panel Members: Jon Jerde (architect of Horton Plaza in
San Diego, which he has said was partly inspired by Paolo's work), Marcos Novak (see
Keynote), Paolo Soleri (see Session #1)
11:45am-1:15pm Lunch
Session #6) 1:30pm-3:00pm
"The construction of the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
complex at Arcosanti is the ground where the paradox of virtuality generating
a hyper-consumptive society is balanced by an
environmental experience developed in a frugal mode only feasible in an
urban context."
- Paolo Soleri, 1996 Could Arcosanti be the location for continuing professional R&D into the questions raised in the preceding panels? The vision for the Arcosanti Media Lab (AML) is to create a world-class multimedia/cyberspace training and research center at Arcosanti. Paolo Soleri will unveil his latest drawings of the Teilhard de Chardin/Arcomedia Center Complexes, the structures at Arcosanti for the AML and participants in related programs such as the Paradox Internship.
Moderators: Ron Anastasia & Michael
Gosney
Panel Members: Jon Jerde (see Session #6), Ron McCoy
(see Session #6), Marcos Novak (see Keynote), Paolo Soleri (see Session #1)
Session #7) 3:00pm-4:30pm "If cyberspace heralds the possible emergence of a collective metamind, then just as the human brain's design frames the quality of experience of an individual mind, so does the design of the digital matrix of cyberspace frame the quality of the Noosphere, and consequently the character of our 21st century psyches and societies." - Michael Gosney
Moderator: Michael Gosney
Panel Members: Coco Conn (SIGGRAPH
organizer, President Digital Circus Productions, creator of CitySpace
Project); Michael O'Rourke (President of Dimension 7, a SF mutimedia
firm pioneering the creation of large scale immersive environments; Mark
Pesce (see Session #2), Sherry Sheridan & Nathan Vogel (Co-Founders of
MindsEyeMedia, a high-end SF digital FX house)
- end of plenary sessions -
5:00pm-7:00pm Dinner
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