ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Agnes Denes’s 1970s map projections and Buckminster Fuller’s energy slave maps (1940–1972) can be understood within a contemporary biopolitical discussion about aesthetics and ecology. I suggest that these architectural and artistic planetary visualizations preview current aesthetic and ecological preoccupations with spatial, social and biological understandings of ‘life’ in the humanities, architecture and the visual arts. In particular, the chapter explores how a biopolitical explanation highlights ‘ratios’ of ecological and economic information in the artist’s and architect’s practices. In addition, I suggest that Denes and Fuller’s work has a renewed historical valency, given the current urgency for addressing climate change on a planetary scale.
