This is a memory of a story about the construction of a telescope. The first day we built a telescope of small dimensions, we looked through it and could not see anything. Then we built a bigger telescope, four times as big. We looked again and… nothing.

At the heart of Provo is the notion of the city as a graphic space. Magazines were sold in the streets, posters were pasted to the walls, performances (“happenings”) took place on public squares (and around specific statues and monuments), surreal slogans were being chanted (such as the repeated mantra of “ugh, ugh, ugh”), and pamphlets were handed out to unsuspecting bystanders. In the meantime, the (illegal) printing press of Provo had to be moved constantly, from one location to another, because there was always the danger of confiscation.

In my early 1990s East Coast punk and anarchist scenes, the Diggers were a myth—a composite of militant urban legends, their exploits mixed up with the actions of the Yippies, Black Mask, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the Provos, the Black Panthers, King Mob, the Metropolitan Indians.

Videofreex (1969–1978) was a close-knit, intensely collaborative group of artists united by the common goal of displaying a perspective they saw as missing from available media. They carried portable video equipment while participating in protest marches and acts of civil disobedience.

In 1966, the world was much the horror that humanity faces today. Black people were catching hell in America, and Huey Newton and Bobby Seal formed the Black Panther Party to end this. The BPP was revolutionary and there was nothing like them in America at the time.

The best speculative art projects have a peculiar ability to come true, years later. In 1973, Haus-Rucker-Co, a “Viennese architectural collective,” in the words of Esther Choi, installed Grüne Lunge (Green Lung) at the Kunsthalle Hamburg.

Being rooted in a context that offered easy access to both hallucinogens as well as pioneering new technologies, the works of the more “action-oriented” hippies produced perceptions, insights, and methodologies that have been guiding me in my daily practice as a designer ever since I’ve discovered them during my studies at the IwB (Institute without Boundaries) in Toronto, now almost a decade ago.

When the anarchic gender-queer theater troupe left the warm circle of their Haight-Ashbury commune for a much-anticipated East Coast debut performance at the Anderson Theater nearly 45 years ago, everyone was there: Liza, Candy, Holly, Andy, John, Yoko, Gore, Truman, etc. But something fundamental was lost in translation from their West Coast hippie amateur anti-money free-for-all community across the continental chasm to Manhattan’s professional circles of downtown cool, and many of New York City’s coolest walked out before the show was even over.

While I generally avoid hyperbole, I can say in good conscience that Blueprint for Counter Education is a truly unique cultural artifact. The outcome of a sustained iterative research, writing, and diagramming process that took place between Brandeis sociology professor (and future dean of Critical Studies at CalArts) Maurice Stein and his then-student Larry Miller, Blueprint’s innovative form and format were then developed by the graphic designer Marshall Henrichs as a mind-expanding example of carefully structured (and mass-distributed) anarchy.

In an alternate reality, I would have composed this piece of text using Xanadu, a dual hypertext library/document editor that could have taken the place of the World Wide Web. Any references I made would have been pulled from the Docuverse, my sources linked explicitly to their original documents, and vice versa, with the original documents linking back to my post.

In front of the Eiffel Tower the main attraction of the 1900 world’s fair in Paris was the Palais de l’Electricité. Lit with thousands of electrical lights, it presented electricity to a large consumer market and a new era took off. In the century to come, a form of energy nobody quite expected made mankind’s ideas of the ultimate extension of the human faculty lift off in record time.

I remember falling in love with a few Superstudio images I encountered back in 2005 or so. It was love at first sight, truly. I didn’t really understand why and still don’t, but those images sorta came to get me. And there wasn’t really anything much on the Internet about the Italian Radicals at that point either. It created a longing. It seems like Superstudio knew back then what we’re learning (again) now, that the image, as a living idea, might be more important than the building in the image.