Spaceship Earth: The Inside Story of the Biosphere 2 Experiment

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“Biosphere 2 (B2) began with a dream”

, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival – and released digitally worldwide last Friday – charts the determination of a group of countercultural visionaries who used art and community to foster a connection with nature. Named Theatre of All Possibilities, the artistic-practice network built a junk rig ship that has sailed for the past 40 years, from which researchers have studied whales, coral reefs and disappearing tropical cultures.

Defining a history can be like unravelling a complex textile, where one is left holding a bunch of coloured threads but the design has disappeared. An artist by nature, I view TAP’s history as a longform performance piece. Over the next 50 years, legions of dramatis personae would join us in an impossibly complex and dense plot. We formed the TAP ensemble, and the Enterprise for Developing Possibilities for project development.

Typically working 18-hour days, in eight short months we constructed the 25-metre ferrocement sailing vessel. Our target was to take advantage of a very high early spring tide. And so, just after sunrise on 22 March 1975, a tugboat pulled our new ship, christened Research Vessel Heraclitus, into the San Francisco Bay. It was a mystical experience on deck to ride her momentum into the bay, like moving through the birth canal. We unfurled a Panamanian flag.

Biosphere 1 is life on Planet Earth. Biosphere 2 began with a dream. John’s napkin scribbles dating back to 1968 trace the designs of a small project, a futuristic ecological community. We had years of discussions among ourselves, and with scientists of all kinds, including space scientists. In one iteration, John dubbed this future project Spaceship Earth City, after Buckminster Fuller’s term for our blue home that hurtles through space, Spaceship Earth.

Now a facility of the University of Arizona, which runs individual research projects and a booming visitors’ centre, it is one of the top ten tourist attractions in the state of Arizona. There’s a parallel between the late 1960s and 2020. Continuous war and assaults on ecologies and legacy cultures are at the forefront of people’s minds. Global cultural values and relationships with the natural world urgently need to be re-examined at the root.

 

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