Envisioning The Earth: The Geosphere Project
Envisioning The Earth: The Geosphere ProjectThe late Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called Tom Van Sant "the only truly modern artist that I know," citing Van Sant's appreciation of technology and science and his incorporation of them into his work. Yet, there is something fundamental about Van Sant's vision: "We spent a couple of million of years evolving as a species...understanding our world through visualization," Van Sant said at an NCSA lecture at the Beckman Institute in March.
"A few hundred years ago, modern cultures committed themselves to the written word as a way of storing and disseminating information," he continued. "While this was obviously beneficial... it also committed us to linear thinking. We soon realized that we could not handle [the information] unless we started chopping it up into segments and compartmentalizing it into a library. But nature is not compartmentalized: it is a symbiotic continuum."
The Geosphere Project, founded in 1989 by Van Sant--also its CEO--is based on the painter-sculptor-architectural designer's dream that complex Earth resource management and global change issues could-- and should--be understood as a symbiotic continuum by policy makers, the research community, educators, and the lay public alike. As an artist, he realized that the only way to understand the complex relationships between the many Earth resource management issues was through visualization.
Plans are underway to use the globe data in the CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment)--a virtual reality, or VR, laboratory designed to surround the viewer with data at UIC's Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL). NCSA will soon have access to the globe data in an interactive environment as well, when EVL completes construction of a CAVE at NCSA's VR Laboratory.
With the CAVE technology, a viewer could stand inside the globe, as it were, viewing the globe from the inside out. This perspective would give the viewer a much larger dis-tortion-free perspective of the globe. NCSA is also exploring the possibility of allocating supercomputer time for the production of the 1k geosphere image, according to NCSA Director Larry Smarr.
"Now we can look at a reality model," said Van Sant. "That's very important for us. Political boundaries cannot be seen from space. They are an artificial concept that we superimpose, I'm sure for many good reasons, but not necessarily for reasons of Earth resource management."
The library's interface is a map of the Earth with various icons representing geographic, human, land, and animal systems. The viewer might select the habitat of the Asian elephant, from the 1970s to the present time, for example. By overlaying this database with agricultural, demographic, and other databases, the viewer can easily understand the relationships between the activities of elephants and man. Or, by selecting an icon representing the South American rainforests, overlaid databases can show that slash and burn deforestation is related not only to the reduction of species habitat, but also the depletion of the already scanty topsoil, the pollution of the streams and ocean reefs, the release of CO2 into the atmosphere, and large releases in methane--the result of an increase in the termite population.
Van Sant envisions a library on each continent someday--housed in what he calls an "Earth Situation Room," the post-Cold War version of the War Room. The library would be networked so that anyone with a computer terminal could access the information.
For example, Van Sant has a database from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA that shows all of the surface currents off the California coast. He also has a database of the migration pattern for gray whales from the Bering Strait to Baja California, where they calve and breed. Do the whales swim against or with the current? It is probably of some interest, but no one has bothered to overlay the two databases.
"I'm saving these kinds of problems for the kids in the pilot programs," Van Sant said. "We can start empowering kids to not only do the work, but then perhaps even stand up and join in policy, to claim their inheritance: the resources that are being used in a nonsustainable manner."
"Bucky Fuller said that we are passengers on the spaceship Earth. Well, we are really not passengers on anything. We are more like part of the upholstery, so to speak. It is us, and we are it, and we are in the system."
