Catastrophe Aesthetics: Buckminster Fuller's Geoscope as Planetary Expanded Cinema Department of Film Studies Speaker Series: Jessica Mulvogue, Department of Film Studies

This talk examines the development of a planetary screen-based work, the Geoscope, by R Buckminster Fuller.

The Geoscope (1950-1970s) was built to be a tool for discovering sustainable solutions to global problems. In its fullest (unrealised) imagination, the Geoscope was a 200ft in diameter georama within which global data on human and nonhuman activity could be visualised on a gigantic 360-degree screen.

The World Game was a supplemental game to be played within the Geoscope: teams competed to make the ‘world work better' by manipulating the visualised data. This presentation, from Jessica Mulvogue, focuses on aspects of this screen-based object that have been overlooked in the limited extant scholarship on it, namely, the connection between the representational features and the immersive experience it offered.

Informed by research carried out at the R Buckminster Fuller archives at Stanford University, Jessica, a Lecturer in Film Studies at St Andrews, positions the Geoscope as a prototypical expanded cinema, one that offers an aesthetic experience different to what Tiago de Luca calls the “planetary sublime” (2022) of earlier georamas. Instead, Jessica suggests the object offers insight into a moment in time in which the earth was catastrophically shifting; its immersive components reveal the contours of this catastrophe by positioning the spectator in a new aesthetic relationship with the image of the earth.