Word: gaia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...radically transformed this numinous sphere. The heart-stopping beauty of the earth set against the dark void of space earned inventor-scientist James Lovelock the first adherents to a theory that appears to reconcile science and religion in the study of life on earth. Lovelock's idea, named the Gaia hypothesis after the ancient earth goddess of the Greeks, is that the planet is alive and functions as a superorganism in which living things interact with geophysical and chemical processes to maintain conditions suitable for life...
...compelling because science now has the tools to explore some of the vast interactions that govern global systems. Although Lovelock first articulated his hypothesis in the early 1970s, in collaboration with microbiologist Lynn Margulis, it has only recently begun to have significant impact on the scientific world. Initially, Gaia was only embraced by New Age types who responded to a holistic view of nature that blurred the distinction between life and death...
Lovelock and Margulis have modified the theory over the years to address scientists' criticism that Gaia implied that the earth acted with a sense of purpose. In its newest form, Gaia has inspired a flood of research into the interaction between living systems and the atmosphere, earth and oceans. At the first major scientific conference on Gaia, sponsored by the American Geophysical Union in 1988, the austere group of scientists ended their meeting by giving Lovelock an exuberant standing ovation...
...with nature reflects a man- centered world view that has evolved over the ages. Almost every society has had its myths about the earth and its origins. The ancient Chinese depicted Chaos as an enormous egg whose parts separated into earth and sky, yin and yang. The Greeks believed Gaia, the earth, was created immediately after Chaos and gave birth to the gods. In many pagan societies, the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature -- the soil, forest, sea -- was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate...
Tucker's new sculptures are named after Greek deities, the impersonal beings who presided over the creation of the world and its gods: the earth spirit Gaia, daughter of Chaos and mother of the Titans; Ouranos, god of the skies; their son Okeanos and his wife Tethys, parents of the sea and river gods. Unlike their Olympian descendants, these were too archaic to have acquired a fixed form in classical art. There was no thousand-year lineage of marble prototypes for their shape. They could be big and indistinct. And the conjunction of monumental size with muffled form entranced Tucker...