the idea of information-art

BY MICHAEL O'CALLAGHAN

“Applying knowledge, scientific or otherwise, is an art. An artist is somebody who knows what to put where and when to put it.”— Wendell Berry

DEFINITION

I define the term information-art as any kind form of art that uses information as its primary medium. Here are some examples

THE GRIANÁN OF AILEACH

The Grianán of Aileach is a good example of what I mean by information-art. Located on a hilltop in Co. Donegal, Ireland, it's the remains of a much larger passage cairn which probably dates to the 5th millennium BCE. The Irish word grianán translates as Stone temple of the Sun. The entrance to the monument is astronomically aligned. At dawn on the Spring Equinox —the ancient Celtic festival of Alban Eilir (“Light of the Earth”) and on the Autumn Equinox (the festival of the Ingathering, Meán Fómhair, An Clabhsúr, or Alban Elfed) — the rising sun casts a narrow beam of light through the entrance passage across the centre of the ring onto the opposite wall, thus focussing the situated observer's attention on our relationship to our local star the Sun, the source of all life on Earth. The Grianán features in Irish mythology and history, and is one of the five Irish royal Irish sites marked on Ptolemy of Alexandria’s 2nd century map of the world. More info about the Grianán is available here.

THE INFORMATION-ART CONCEPT

I coined the concept of information-art in 1972 during a midsummer night field trip to a 5,000 year-old megalithic passage cairn situated near the summit of Tibradden mountain overlooking Dublin Bay and the Irish Sea. Probably dating from c. 4800 - 3000 BCE, the site is known locally (but perhaps incorrectly) as Niall Dubh’s Grave. According to Ireland's extensive oral history and folklore, these monuments were built by the pre-Indo-European Tuatha Dé Danaan (People of the Goddess Danu) who inhabited the island in the neolithic period before the arrival of the bronze age Celts in the second millennium BCE. Local folklore said the cairn is aligned to the Summer Solstice sunrise, so I rounded up close friends to see if this was true. Sure enough, the cairn at Tibradden features a spiral petroglyph (a common solar symbol in Irish megalitic art) and a narrow passage aligned to the point where the sun first appears on the horizon at the summer solstice. I saw this as a work of information-art — a cognitive context of information that simply draws the attention of a situated observer/participlant in a particular way — in this case on an important moment in spacetime (the dawn of the longest day of the year), and on our relation to the Sun, which is the source of all life on Earth. Most of the projects I have undertaken since then are conceived to create, in one way or another, contexts of information that focus the observer's awareness in a particular way.

Tibradden: the passage aligned to summer solstice sunrise over the Irish Sea.

Tibradden: the spiral petroglyph solar symbol on the chamber floor

some of my information-art projects

THE GLOBAL VISION MOVIE

The GLOBAL VISION MOVIE idea came to me during my visit to the megalithic site at Tibradden. Conceived as a work information-art, the initial idea was to make an artisit film about the relation between man and nature, using the citg of Dublin as the central metaphor. To develop the concept I moved to New York in 1976 and set up Biosynergy Foundation to carry out the initial R&D for this impressionistic documentary feature film, which I now conceived as a collective self-portrait of Humanity and the biosphere. The first iteration of the project proposal, then titled State of the Planet, received high level support from a transdisciplinary network of friends and partners including Nobel Peace laureate Seán MacBride, the cinema artist and timelapse pioneer Hilary Harris, the Santana percussionist Michael Shrieve, comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, the Club of Rome founder Aurelio Peccei, the MIT Center for Appropriate Technology director Ron Anastasia, Donella Meadows at the Systems Dynamics Lab at MIT, medical anthropologist Joan Halifax, radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, economist and futurist Hazel Henderson at the Princeton Center for Alternative Futures, Emeritus Professor of International Law Richard Falk at Princeton University, multimedia artist Gerd Stern, New Age magazine publisher Eric Utne, the American Holilstic Medical Association director Rick Ingrasci, World Future Society co-founder Barbara Marx Hubbard, and the former TIme Magazine New York bureau chief Robert A. Schwartz. I then wrote the story outline or image recipe for the film, designed a theoretical collective sensemaking process for the participatoryn design of the film's information content based on my syntropy ratio model of cognitive processing in self-organising systems. I assembled all the related info in a150-page participatory planning manual for stakeholders to collaborate in planning the film's content, and conceived a music-driven editing system called Image Resonance to assemble the footage. My next phase of R&D was to interview leading thinkers for the Future Tapes project (see below). Producing the film would now be more timely than ever!

FUTURE TAPES.

Buckminster Fuller.

FUTURE TAPES was a collective sensemaking project I produced and directed in New York from 1978-1981 under the aegis of my NGO Global Vision Corporation. It's a collection of dozens of 3-minute interactive videos about the future of the world, made by its own public including ordinary people and leading global thinkers. Participants recorded their message alone in a private room, while facing their live image on a video monitor. All tapes were then screened back for the whole group; this feedback loop enabled each participant to become more aware of the group differences and consensus. Participants included the visionary designer Buckminster Fuller, paleoanthropologist Richard E. Leakey, futurist Hazel Henderson, psychiatrist R.D. Laing, eco-philosopher Thomas Berry, architect Paolo Soleri, educatior Elaine de Beauport, US Center for Defense Information director Rear-Admiral Gene LaRoque, anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge, economist Kenneth Boulding, UN Under-secretary General Robert Mueller, and many other leading thinkers and ordinary people. Here's what Bucky Fuller said: "The next few years of humans on board Spaceship Earth are going to be as event-packed as a million years, a million years ago! We will know then, whether humans are going to remain on board of planet Earth... (...) The point is, the universe wants to find out whether individual humans have the integrity to really go along with their own decisions, or are they still going to take orders from others? I simply say, if we stay on planet Earth, it's because we pass our cosmic examination of integrity." The project was inspired by my collaboration with the American video artist Wendy Clarke's Love Tapes, a public interactive video project we held for two weeks in the lobby of the World Trade Centre in New York. Hundreds of people participated. A daily selection of the tapes were broadcast on Manhattan Cable TV, which brought more participants. The project made video history and was featured with a front page headline in the New York Post.

NUCLEAR TAPES

NUCLEAR TAPES was a one-off interactive video / collective sensemaking event about the nuclear arms race, which I helped my friend Suzanne Greason to organise in response to the nuclear arms race which was in full swing at the time of production in 1981. We produced the project in collaboration with the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard School of Medicine. The event was part of a historic meeting of IPPNW — International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. Participants recorded their message in a private booth, while facing their live image on a video monitor. All tapes were then screened back for the whole group; this feedback loop enabled each participant to become more aware of the group's differences and consensus. Participants included Dr. Helen Caldicott, (Australia), Dr. Georgy Arbatov (USSR), Dr. Evgueni Chazov (USSR), Dr. Bernard Lown (USA), Dr. Tatsuichiro Akizuki (Japan), Rear-Admiral Gene LaRoque (USA) and others. Everybody recorded their 3-minute video in private. All tapes were then screened back for the whole group. The consensus and differences were obvious. IPPNW went on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. In 20017 IPPNW launched the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the Nobel Prize for peace that same year. As of 2021 ICAN is the lead medical NGO campaigning for a global treaty to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons, along with more than 200 humanitarian, environmental, human rights, peace and development organizations in more than 80 countries.

SUSTAINABLE CITY

NASA photo of Dublin, Ireland.

SUSTAINABLE CITY was my idea to create a GIS (geographic information system) software package to enable city stakeholders including urban planners, local authorities, architects, corporations, NGOs and other stakeholders to obtain a whole systems view of their city's environmental sustainability, measure their ecological footprints, evaluate sustainable development scenarios, and engage in citizen science, participatory planning and collective sensemaking. I developed the concept in 1996-2001 with support from New York University and the J.M. Kaplan Fund as part of the Local Agenda 21 initiative launched at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Participants included ESRI (the world's leading mapping and location analytics platform), Kaarin Taipale, the chair of ICLEI (the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives, which produced the excellent Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide), Prof. William E. Rees at the University of British Columbia School of Regional Planning (who co-founded the ecologial footprint concept with Mathis Wackernagel), urban theorist and filmmaker Herbert Girardet (Chairman of the Schumacher Society UK), and Marcello Palazzi who organised the parallel corporate component of the UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II ) in Istanbul in 1996, where the idea received a Corporate Best Practice Award.

ASTRONOMICAL DESIGN OF IRISH MEGALITHIC MONUMENTS

CLICK HERE FOR MAP INFO AND LEGEND (opens in new window)

In 2001 I applied my information-art strategy for my campaign to protect Irish megalithic monuments dating from 4000 - 3000 BCE from being vandalised during renovations to convert the sites into tourist attractions. The famous solar alignement of the great passage-mound at Newgrange (c. 3200 BCE) was widely acknowledged, but this was regarded as a unique stroke of genius by an otherwise astronomically illiterate stone age culture. The fact of widespread astronomical design of these sites was ignored and ridiculed by the local archaeological establishment, which denied the scientific evidence and in one case blocked a passage at Knowth with a block of concrete, thus impairing further research on the effective oriigins of the scientific method by stone age Pre- European people, including the possibility that the builders used that particuilar monument to synchronise the solar year with the 19-year lunar cycle, thousands of years before the Greek astronomer Meton did so in the 5th century BCE! To demonstrate the widespread astronomical design, I designed this map in collaboration with a network of independent researchers to identify and document 40 known and/or suspected astronomical alignments surrounding Newgrange (the great passage-mound of Brú na Bóinne / Newgrange in the Boyne Valley UNESCO World Heritage Site) and launchjed a related petition demanding an end to the vandalism. This initially generated substantial controversy from the archaeological establishment, but the petition finally succeeded after receving over 1,000 signatures from prominent supporters including the Hon. Garech a Brún, the Hon. Desmond Guinness, and the 7th Earl of Rosse Brendan Parsons (whose ancestor the 2nd Earl created the world's largest telescope at Birr Castle in 1845).

THE GM-FREE IRELAND MAP

THE GM-FREE IRELAND MAP is an infographic poster and related county maps which I created as part of my information-art strategy to keep the island of Ireland off-limits to the cultivation of genetically-modifed (GMO) crops. I designed the map to declare 1,000 GMO-free zones on the island of Ireland on Earth Day 2005, when the European Commission wanted to allow cultivation of GM maize and oilseed rape in the EU member states. The full-size poster neatly shows that Ireland is too small to grow GM rapeseed without irreversibly contaminating all farmland, protected wildlife areas and Natura 2000 sites. This information-art strategy generated global media coverage, mobilised 131 stakeholder organisations to join the GM-free Ireland Network, led the government & the N. Ireland Assembly to agree an all-island GM-free crop policy in 2007, and —in collaboration with the other GMO-free EU Regions— has since prevented the Commission from approving any new GM crops. More.

THE GLOBAL VISION GENEVA SPECIAL EVENT

GLOBAL VISION GENEVA is a special multimedia event now being planned as the live film set for our forthcoming cinéma vérité documentary feature film, The Politics of Perception which we plan to shoot in April 2023. The centerpiece of the event is a transdisciplinary trans-sectoral multi-stakeholder conference framed by art, science, and theatre. The event is conceived as a work of information art in the form of a convivial happening or situation to focus participants attention on the connection between the global meta-crisis and our ways of seeing it.

RELATED TEXTS

Sustainability: positioning the concept as a global goal. Michael O'Callaghan, Global Vision Corporation, New York, 1997 NGO position paper for the UNESCO conference on Environment & Society: Education and Public Awareness for Sustainability. Thessaloniki, Greece. 1997. Published in Environment & Society : Education and Public Awareness for Sustainability, proceedings of the Thessaloniki International Conference organised by UNESCO and the Government of Greece, University of Athens, 1998, ISBN 960-86312-0-3. Re-published in Sustainable Development: Education, The Force of Change, Transdisciplinary Project “Educating for a Sustainable Future”, (EPD) UNESCO, 1999, Paris, ISBN 92-9143-039-0.. Global Vision: Worldview Formation and Transformation — Cognitive Processing in Self-Organising Systems. Michael O'Callaghan, Global Vision Corporations, New York, 1981Written in 1981, this text was privately circulated as the participatory planning manual for the content of an impressionistic musical feature film conceived as a collective self-portrait of humankind and the biosphere. It includes a conceptual framework that integrates Francisco Varela’s concept of autopoiesis, Gregory Bateson’s epistemology and Buckminster Fuller’s idea of negentropy into a new cognitive model of biological and social evolution called the Syntropy Ratio theory. The futurist and development policy analyst Hazel Henderson praised this as “one of the most succinct descriptions of the theoretical underpinnings of the societal transformation of human cultures now underway, and why this new worldview must be fostered.”