Maps not only made these previously uncharted terrains available to explorers, adventurers, and armchair travelers, but, crucially, their initial creation often relied on someone physically traversing the spaces that were subsequently represented (thus the white blotches on early modern Western maps of continents that had not yet been crossed in their entirety by a note-taking explorer). Some postmodern critiques notwithstanding, maps did aim at understanding the spaces they depicted. Yet all three differ in regard to their ontological implications for man’s relationship with Earth. Insofar as they too adopt a bird’s eye view, aerial and outer-space photographs can be considered an extension of maps. They also developed a geoscope, a small globe into which a man could insert his upper torso in order to view, through sheets of transparent plastic, flickering lights indicating world data such as the distribution of resources: “Viewing the stars through the semi-transparent land masses, from the centre of such a miniature-earth would powerfully locate man in his universe.” 2 The diminutive size of the device emphasized man’s central position even more than Wyld’s globe, as it allowed only one individual at a time to be the center of the world.
Mapublisher creating a globe image skin#
By the early 1960s, Fuller and his then-colleague John McHale from the British Independent Group had further reduced the globe to a “Miniature Earth,” a geodesic sphere covered with a textile skin upon which the silhouettes of the continents were printed. In 1956, Fuller envisioned a “Minni Earth” in front of the United Nations in New York as a visual reminder of the immense scope of the organization’s global tasks. It was followed in 1900 by the “Great Globe” conceived-though never realized-by the French anarchist-geographer Elisée Reclus and the architect Louis Bonnier for the World Exposition in Paris, and, fast-forwarding to the mid-twentieth century, by various globes proposed by Buckminster Fuller. For example, in 1851 the map publisher James Wyld erected in London a wooden sphere sixty feet in diameter that could be entered in order to study the world that was painted on the inside. Initially of rather small size, large-scale spheres from the nineteenth century onwards allowed for more direct forms of encounter. Globes are one way of representing the earth.
The press and the curious lingered outside the wall, joined by the occasional participant who could no longer bear the hunger pangs, made worse by the temptations of a nearby Chinese restaurant. There, a four-foot-high inflatable wall delineated a compound within which those who were fasting camped. But the organizers could neither secure a prominent site nor a permit for the innovative shell, which was deemed to be a fire risk, and so the event took place instead in a motel parking lot in the city of Hayward. The structure, dubbed Liferaft Earth, was designed by Charlie Tilford, a graduate student in engineering at Columbia University, and the participants were to live exclusively within it for the duration of the fast.
Originally, the communal fasting was to be held inside an inflatable, one-hundred-by-one-hundred-foot polyethylene pillow. From the outset, the lofty intentions conflicted with a more dreary reality. The goal was to personally experience the bodily pain of those who suffer from famine and to issue a warning about the mass starvations predicted for the 1970s. The event was inspired by a hashish-induced vision that had come to the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, when reading Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb.
In October 1969, at the height of the irrational fears about the imminent detonation of the population bomb, about one hundred hippies assembled in the San Francisco Bay area to stage a “hunger show,” a week-long period of total fasting.
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