How to Build a Social Sculpture

At Expo 67, the 1967 world’s fair in Montreal, the United States’ pavilion was the Biosphere, a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. At the time, it was the largest freestanding structure ever built—big enough to contain a 135-foot escalator and hanging NASA spacecraft. In the decade that followed, geodesic domes became emblematic of an idealistic, forward-thinking hippie lifestyle. The fact that the Biosphere went up in flames in 1976 feels, now, more than a little symbolic. (Fuller himself said that the choice between utopia or oblivion “will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.”)

Still, the positivist influence of the Biosphere and world’s fairs remains. At the Visions2030 Earth Edition Festival at CalArts, it showed up in the configuration, a series of separate “nodes” housing different provocations and visions for our future on earth, as well as in the contents of the central node: a trio of geodesic domes called the Lumisphere Experience.

“There is a message here for you. Listen,” intoned a warm baritone voice as I and a dozen other “luminauts” reclined with headphones inside the second dome. Kaleidoscopic mandalas of flora and fauna, geological wonders, elemental eruptions, and crystal waters (created with the same technology that powers the new sphere in Las Vegas) showered down on us, and we were encouraged to imagine our perfect world.

“What role would you play?” the voice inquired, before we were ushered into the third and final dome, where we created our personal utopias on iPads. Generated by AI based on a series of word prompts like “farming,” “solar power,” and “coastal,” the results were projected onto hanging LED panels. Although all the visuals were more than a little psychedelic, these spaces were not meant for parties.

Earth Edition, a ten-day celebration of eco-consciousness that took over large swaths of CalArts’ Valencia campus during Climate Week last September, was designed to inspire social change. The brainchild of Carey Lovelace, a New York–based curator, activist, and founder of the digital collective and platform Visions2030, and Elizabeth Thompson, a social entrepreneur and the former executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, the festival was intended to spark optimism in order to spur action. Joseph Beuys’s idea of “social sculpture”—essentially, that society is an artwork we all can shape—acted as a guiding concept.

Lovelace started Visions2030 in early 2020 in response to the despair and doomscrolling she noticed in conversations about the climate crisis, but the platform immediately took on a greater purpose during Covid, uniting people in that time of isolation. Her founding partners were the New York–based Union Theological Seminary, the oldest social justice organization in the United States, and CalArts. Lovelace attended the latter in its early, radical days in the 1970s, when Judy Chicago created the Feminist Art Program and Allan Kaprow, coiner of the term “happenings,” was a member of the faculty. When organizing their own sort of happening was proposed, CalArts’ current president, Ravi Rajan, liked the idea of trying to retrieve this revolutionary spirit and offered the campus as the festival site. Earth Edition’s eclectic, ambitious programming this fall included a hundred talks and conversations; workshops and performances; and site-specific art installations and exhibitions.

At the Indigenous Deep Knowledge Circle, culture bearers shared songs, storytelling, and the history of the Fernandeño Tatavian/Chumash people, upon whose ancestral land the festival was taking place. The Zukunft Garten nodded to solarpunk, a future tech movement that stands in eco-friendly contrast to the dystopian worldview of cyberpunk (epitomized by Blade Runner), and hosted panels on subjects like “hacktivism,” as well as a daily late afternoon soundbath. KCRW DJs and musicians, including the indigenous hip-hop artist Supaman and the South American surf rock band Salt Petal, played at the Sustainable Sounds stage, close to the school’s John Baldessari Studios. And if you wanted to connect with nature on a more physical level, there was goat yoga. (Let’s just say I never need to have a goat, however cute it might be, climb on my back again.)

The exhibition Futuring: Art for Building New Worlds meandered through an indoor gallery and screening room, plus nine outdoor sites around campus. Curated by Visions2030 associate director Vera Petukhova, the works ranged from organic, evolving sculptures made with spirulina algae, animal by-products, and decomposing sprouts, to real-time visualizations of global carbon emissions data by Marina Zurkow and James Schmitz. The simple, analog blueprints for The Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s “abolitionist pod”—a structure and “plant library” designed to combat food insecurity—were shared in an open source gesture.

A casual observer would never have known that the curved ceramic vessels of Roya Ziba’s Looneh: Journey to (W)hole referenced Sufi poetry, Olla pottery irrigation systems, and swallows’ nests. Or that Isabel Beavers’s Nocturne light sculptures, made from beeswax and pigment, were clustered like a mycorrhizal network, but the grace of their forms could certainlybe appreciated. In this context, though, was beauty enough? The artistic director of the LA-based Supercollider Collective, whose mission is to connect art, science, and the public, Beavers also presented a 4D animated film. In The Sky Has Not Yet Fallen, a digital landscape morphs and dissolves as looped voices repeat the mantra-like recitation: “Flourishing when the world is turned upside down requires a dissociation from what was and a commitment to what will be.” According to the artist’s statement, the film contemplated “the birth of new environmental mythologies.”

Cannupa Hanska Luger, a multidisciplinary artist born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, used mythology to reframe history and time in his Future Ancestral Technologies series. In this poetic trio of short films, a pair of Indigenous nomads traversed postcolonial landscapes, outfitted in spectacularly colorful regalia fashioned from cultural detritus like thrifted afghans and hockey gear. Per the artist, the journey traced a path toward a collective future in which our bonds with the earth could be restored.

Curated by Leslie Labowitz Starus, whose SPROUTIME installation (1980–) decayed on a site across campus, the EcoExpo brought together environmental pioneers and next-generation leaders in sustainability. There were representatives from the Los Angeles Eco-village, a forty-person intentional community founded in Koreatown thirty years ago; Treepeople, which has planted more than three million trees in its fifty years; Centro CSO, which trained Chicanx activists like Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez; plus Compton Community Garden, which has fed Compton locals for a decade, and LA Urban Farms, a proponent of water-saving vertical gardens. However, aside from the seed bomb-making workshops hosted by Metabolic Studio (best known for its sister projects Not a Cornfield (2005) and Bending the River (2005–), there were few opportunities to engage with these groups celebrated for their hands-on work, beyond having a quick chat and picking up some literature.

Visions2030 deserves praise for its scope—the resources and sheer brainpower assembled could have galvanized a small nation—but despite the plentiful staff and stacked public programming, the sprawling festival lacked a sense of containment or real guidance about how to process all this information. (The production team might have been wise to look to mycorrhizal networks as their model, ensuring that the subterranean messages were connecting.) On the surface level, it was hard to ignore incongruities, like the industrial fans blowing at full force while the heads of MOCA’s Environmental Council spoke about energy conservation in regard to climate control or the banks of plastic, chemical porta potties near artworks while exhibitors extolled the wonders of composting. Jenna Didier, the executive director of the LA River Public Art Project, gave a talk on “Regenerative Strategies in a Degenerate World,” and one could argue that both polarities were in evidence. For that matter, why would an event with roots in the digital space, hosted by an institute with advanced media facilities, miss the opportunity to live stream the many outstanding talks and performances?

Sometimes, excess is just excess, even if your intention is to facilitate revolution—a contrast made that much starker within this setting that was at times both corporate and institutional. (Even Judy Chicago barely made it through her two years at CalArts, after all.) Addressing a group of students whose teacher had brought them to the Zukunft Garten to hear her talk about ecology, disruption, and creativity, Metabolic Studio founder Lauren Bon offered a refreshing reminder that in a schema that pits solarpunk against cyberpunk, perhaps the optimal path might just be … punk. “Nice plants and chimes do not change the system,” Bon declared bluntly, gesturing around the room. “What you need to do is figure out where the power structure is and consider how to unbuild the system.”

I’ll admit I felt a little skeptical when I emerged from the Lumisphere. No doubt, I could have lounged in the dome for hours; it was like an immersive guided meditation. (Because its geometry mimics the molecules of nature—the twenty-sided icosahedron is the shape of water—geodesic domes are believed to facilitate healing.) But when the AI rendering of my “dream world” was sent to me and projected on an LED screen in the last dome, I didn’t feel connected to this bamboo dwelling with gleaming solar panels on the roof, situated at the edge of a crystalline lagoon under multiple moons and planets. (Cosmic was another word I’d chosen.) It looked cool but felt slick—emphasis on the “artificial” part of AI.

Still, I had an illuminating conversation with Will Dearborn, one of the guides in the “mentoring tent” that the Lumisphere fed into, who explained that these groovy graphics should be treated as symbols, not solutions; they weren’t meant as the final step but the first. Dearborn had been on-site for all ten days, greeting people as they emerged from the dome with the purpose of starting a dialogue, and he found that the best way to make people feel empowered was by simply listening to them.

The Mexican artist Michele Lorusso might have had the same idea when he designed the outdoor installation Dispositivos III, a modular set of low plywood tables and stools inspired by Japanese carpentry but made in Mexico. Lorusso, a current CalArts student, invited participants to sit down and write letters in answer to the questions “What is the present climate chaos you see?” and “What is the future climate balance you imagine?” These letters, buried in a time capsule that will be opened in 2030, might be a comforting gesture, but they also presume we will figure out how to survive our present moment.

Within this context, how do we quantify social change? The experience of Earth Edition felt both vague and chaotic. I understand and appreciate the desire to connect humanity through a shared vision of hope, yet choosing to walk an optimistic path doesn’t make the science go away. Had the speculative been balanced more with the practical, it might have been easier to give in to dreaming.