David Cornberg
Pages 32-43
DOI: 10.5840/cultura20074118
ABSTRACT
For all whose eyes are clear and ears are open, it is a crystalline reality that we are riding a gigantic wave of globalization whose forces can as easily build mountains up to pinnacles as tear them down to fragments. With equal clarity, we can agree that in order to maximize the positive and minimize the negative consequences of our individual and collective creations, we must sustain open and complex dialogue. In this spirit, I present two images on their way to being ideas: the open world viewpoint and the new world language. To understand these, I deploy an anecdote about my father that leads to a reflection on the transformation of change into diversity, which in turn stages the new viewpoint and the new language. In 1970, my father, Sol Cornberg, retired from his profession as a consultant on electronic communications systems. He had pioneered the development of electronic imagery including participating as a designer in the construction of the first color television studio in the world that NBC built during the 1950’s in Burbank, California. My father decided to leave his profession and become the full-time manager of his highly successful writer-wife’s financial affairs after he attended a Sol Cornberg retrospective at a university in Sweden. The organizers of the event had reprinted everything he had ever published and displayed them on the walls of hallways in their education building where the presentations took place. My father was appalled because he had argued for years that the physical structure of universities should be replaced by underground electronic brains that would allow storage and retrieval of all information from remote terminals in private houses, vehicles, government offices, ete. But he found himself and his work being celebrated in the very structures whose disappearance he had urged. He decided that no one was listening to him and, if they were listening, they were not understanding and,