We call our collaboration Black Lantern Synergy. One of our heroes and one of the original American intellectual All-Stars is a man named R. Buckminster Fuller. Fuller is famous for inventing the geodesic dome, the result of his search for a universal structure—in this case, a circle or sphere of incredible structural simplicity and strength made from triangles. In the 60s and 70s, Fuller used to give these all-day lectures, demonstrations of his far-reaching theories incorporating geometry, linguistics, technology, history, and others. We have taken inspiration from Fuller and use a description of a black lantern as an homage to Fuller’s book, No More Secondhand God. In it, Fuller describes a seemingly opaque, black object that, when lit with a sufficient light, emits a vari-colored spectrum of light– hence, what he termed a black lantern of paradox. It was in paradox that Fuller hunted for truth.
So, although when not lit the Black Lantern seems a cold, dark object, upon the introduction of flame, the Black Lantern of Paradox emits a shocking, beautiful multicolored light. We light our own black lantern with creativity’s spark, the colorful light that originates in the darkness of the mind, to shed light on the paradox that is the human separation from nature—to reveal our blind flight from darkness. We ask for a bit of your flame, too.
Tenet number one of the Black Lantern Synergy manifesto begins like this, with the words of Bucky himself:
Synergy means behavior of integral aggregate systems unpredicted by behaviors of any of their components or subassemblies of their components. Chrome-nickel-steel has a higher tensile, or integrally self-cohering, strength than the sum of the tensile strengths of its alloyed elements. Synergistic behaviors are commonplace throughout chemistry and biochemistry but so unfamiliar to human’s visible spectrum range events that the word syn-ergy, though equal in age of its companion word en-ergy, is popularly unfamiliar.
The lack of popular and academic familiarity with the word synergy, which in the english language alone denotes the behavior of whole systems unpredicted by behavior of their components, means that humans in their everyday social world have not been in need of this word, which in turn tells us that they lack this fundamental conception in their conscious thinking processes. They ascribe all behaviors unpredicted by statistical probabilities to “luck” or miracle. This particular gap in human’s everyday fundamental thinking and common sense accounts for many fallacies in his spontaneous reflexing and contemporary behavior. Ignorant of the regenerative significance of synergy, human is vulnerable to de-generative feedback consequences in his comprehensive determinations.
-No More Secondhand God [Discussion of the Omnidirectional Halo], 1963
For more on the origins of the BLS project, click here. Below are some of our early conceptions of the Black Lantern…
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And yet another piece of the puzzle falls into place, I remember this vaguely but rereading it in relation to the context at hand is pure.....um.........SYNERGY!
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