One of the most extraordinary books of the century is coming online. Synergetics, the magnum opus of the late R. Buckminster Fuller, has been painstakingly digitized and is being put on the Web in its entirety.
Pronounced the "Leonardo da Vinci of our time" by Marshall McLuhan, Fuller invented everything from the geodesic dome to a device that cleaned without soap. While his influence spanned generations and transcended disciplines, the crowning achievement and foundation of all his work was Synergetics, in which he described and cataloged the coordinate system of "Universe," with the four-sided tetrahedron as the basic unit of all matter.
Like Fuller's work, the book looked outward in all directions, which didn't lend well to the linear print form; a second volume, Synergetics 2, was published four years later with numbered sections designed to be dovetailed among the first.
"The final concept I believe that Bucky had was that it was just one big work," said Robert Gray, a Fuller scholar who four years ago began the job of scanning on a couple of Mac and PC machines. "So why not somehow cut and paste it and put the section numbers in the order that they're listed in?"
Gray's original intent was to present his work to Fuller's estate, hoping it could interest a publisher in printing a new volume. Instead, he was approached by E. J. Applewhite, Fuller's collaborator who organized and arranged his copious notes into the original books and who suggested they put it on the Web.
Fuller's estate, said Gray, was first hung up on the issue of copyright, but chose to commission Gray and Applewhite's efforts.
"They've allowed it to be published on the Web, which is amazing," said Gray. "They're taking a big leap of faith in allowing this to go out, and I think that's to their credit."
When the 876-page "big red book" of Synergetics was published in 1975 by the Macmillan Publishing Company, it confounded most readers and was never completely accepted outside the domain of hardcore Fullerians.
"People couldn't make sense of it, and that still continues to be a problem," said Kirby Urner, moderator of the synergetics-l and whose Portland-based firm, 4D Solutions, is named from an early Fuller text.
"It is multi-disciplinary, and should not be looked at strictly through math and science," Kirby said. "It's not the first 'hard' book - Finnegan's Wake is hard - but [the humanities] see the geometric figures, think it's math and ignore it. The core of Synergetics is the Concentric Hierarchy, how to fit polyhedra together. It's sixth grade stuff and 20 years later they're not even teaching it at that level."
Besides reintroducing a broader audience to Fuller's work - most of which is long out-of-print - Synergetics' new, digital form will allow for minor revisions and the correction of typographical errors.
It's been agreed that if scientific problems are found, they won't be "fixed" in the text. "You can gloss things so easily on the Web with marginalia. If you've got problems with texts, there's no limit to how much commentary you can have," said Urner.
The use of hypertext also allows for multiple views of the same work. Outfitting the Synergetics text with a hypermedia system such as Hyperwave will allow for annotations and version control - making alternate versions with updated information and commentary possible.
"This will continue to evolve," said Gray. "There are amazing [Synergetics-related] images out on the Web - all done by other people, but they're absolutely mind-blowing. We'd like to somehow point to these images and make others aware of these connections that are very relevant. We don't have that mechanism in place and don't know how we want to do that yet."
Currently, the tables which appear in the text still need to be put online, but all of the beautiful color plates from the two volumes are up in multiple resolutions.
Fuller, who called himself a comprehensivist, continually charged against the walls between disciplines, asking us to "dare to be naive." It is certain that exactly this will happen as his digital work finds new readers, yielding a complex of new discoveries. "It's amazing at just how many levels Synergetics can be taken," said Urner. "From artists to crystallographers, people from all walks of life are going to the same text, and that's how you know it's an important work."
