The work of Michael Saup explores the unintended consequences of design: Orbis Lumen.

+b (ORBIT) shows Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map of the earth built from multiple layers of white industrial sugar cubes and illuminated by the complete sequence of all nuclear explosions from 1945 until now. Using the cubes as three-dimensional pixels, +b emphasizes the intimate relationship between information, energy, resources and their impact on society and nature. +b stages the most extreme power released by humankind, irreversibly transforming the atmosphere and igniting the epoch of the nuclear Anthropocene with its application and supposed mastery of atomic power.

The work illustrates how this mastery is really the reiteration of a profound error and the subsequent compounding of that error. We keep on making mistakes. Some of these errors are extraordinarily beautiful and useful, some are terrifyingly destructive with long-term planetary impact, and many are both.

“Tuesday, I had a conversation with Ilaria Forte to discuss our collaboration on the Plenum: A Collective Story of Regeneration. We discussed the possibility of working with Michael Saup to create a Dymaxion map of the Earth, based on his work for Orbis Lumen, with points of light to indicate locations for the stories of regeneration represented by the Design Science Studio.”

The epoch of the nuclear Anthropocene