Patrick F. Spear » Projects

For one of our short essay projects, we were asked to created a supplementary piece that spoke to the nature of our paper’s thesis. My paper focused on the conjecture that elements of Constant’s design for New Babylon directly reflected the nature of the ludic society for which New Babylon was designed. The elements I discussed follow:

• New Babylon’s population is assumed to be free of concern and defined solely by the creative impulses it pursues and would not become concerned with intrinsic means of division such as nationalism or creed. In the same manner, the network does not contain division or boundaries, nor even the language that could be used to impose or deduct any kind of geography-based order or classification system.
• The nomadic travel of the society’s inhabitants would have no inherent beginning, end or destination. Similarly, the network proposed by Constant had no origin, termination or explicit direction.
• The network was designed as a completely decentralized, distributed and homogeneous system where no area is given explicit meaning apart from that designated by the inhabitants. This mirrors the population’s socialist underpinnings, where responsibility for the society is distributed evenly and no person is given more credence than another.

To create a piece that captured these properties, I made a virtual model (not having the resources for a practical one) of one of Constant’s drawings of New Babylon’s networks that stretched fully around a globe, rather than being confined to a plane. Seeing a representation of the network at its zenith illustrates these properties of the network, and thus the population, that are not apparent in more limited models.