Bucky and Cosmopoetics at NYU

BFI Board Chair David McConville and Joachim Krausse, another erudite Bucky scholar, will be speaking at Cosmopoetics: A Symposium on (Post-)Modern Epistemology at NYU’s Deutsches Haus on Friday, March 7. It should be an interesting day, so make sure you put it on your calendar!

From Deutsches Haus:
“In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families.” This strange and enigmatic sentence is Walter Benjamin’s outlook at the end of his 1928 book “Einbahnstrasse”. The symposium “Cosmopoetics” will try to follow its trajectory by discussing the return of cosmology in 20th century thought. What does it mean when technology becomes a comprehensive organizing principle encompassing man and nature and leaving behind all political and cultural traditions? The lectures will lead from Weimar Germany and its technology obsessed avant-garde to American cybernetics and the counterculture of the nineteen-sixties. A key figure in this context will be R. Buckminster Fuller, who wanted the architect to be a “world planner” and who therefore can be called the founder of (post-)modern “Cosmopoetics”.