Schwarz
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In the late 1960s, when the merger of art and technology became a touchstone for both countercultural mind-liberation and New Frontier futurism, Buckminster Fuller served as a central, if gnomic, philosopher of the moment. The first issue of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 features a semi-mystical autobiographical fragment by Fuller and his poem-cum-manifesto "God is a Verb"; Gene Youngblood's seminal 1970 study Expanded Cinema includes a lengthy introduction by Fuller, in which he praises the "forward, omni-humanity educating function of man's total communication system"; and the premier issue of early video art's central journal Radical Software published a "pirated transcription" of an interview videotaped by the Raindance Corporation. "We hear people talk about technology as something very threatening," Fuller says in the stream-of-language transcript, "but we are technology, the universe is technology...it's simply a matter of understanding these things." Fuller's own book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth became an underground best-seller after its publication in 1969. Multimedia collectives like USCO and Ant Farm cited "Bucky" as inspiration; members of the latter group even went so far as to abduct Fuller when he came to speak at the University of Houston, picking him up from the airport under false pretense and taking him instead to see a touring MoMA exhibit entitled The Machine at the End of the Mechanical Age.