Chapter 12

Paul Ryan: From Guerilla Television Warfare to Ecochannel

Video for Social Change

Although I have already mentioned the exhibition in the chapter about Nam June Paik, it is worthwhile to note that only two installations, Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider’s Wipe Cycle and Paul Ryan’s Everyman’s Moebius Strip, as well as Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman’s performance, dealt with the external communications aspects of video as a two-way system, instead of only its internal qualities as an image processing system. Wipe Cycle consisted of nine monitors, a TV camera and videotape. Using feedback, the spectators could see themselves immediately when entering the space, mixed with pre-recorded images and a normal television program. The images moved in four cycles from one monitor to the next, with an eight to sixteen second delay. Ira Schneider explained to Jud Yalkut: “The most important function of Wipe Cycle was to integrate the audience into the information. It was a live feedback system which enabled the viewer standing within its environment to see himself not only in time and space, but also eight seconds ago and sixteen seconds ago. In addition he saw standard broadcast images alternating with his own delayed/live image.”[362] Frank Gillette started working with video in 1968, coming from painting. Wipe Cycle was his first major piece made in collaboration with Ira Schneider. Marshall McLuhan is said to have given him the opportunity to utilize a portable video recorder. Gillette became known for his videotapes and installations ‘depicting’ biological processes in nature, using real time and time delay devices.[363] Ira Schneider had studied art-history, but turned to filmmaking. In 1969, he began working in video, and he has made a number of video installations.

To recall, most artists of the early hour utilized such technical features as feedback and closed-circuit as a kind of ‘self-communication.’ A small group, some of its members coming from music, like Ron Hays and Steve Beck, was interested in computers, and experimented with video/television’s image processing features. And those artists who connected video with social change and its educational possibilities for cable, emphasized the communication aspects and discussed video in terms of an information system. The latter generally recorded in a rather straightforward manner.

Paul Ryan, Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider had all become involved with Raindance Corporation, which was founded in 1969 by Michael Shamberg and others as a countercultural think tank. Guerrilla TV groups like Raindance started out with ideals about changing TV’s one-way communication system into a two-way system which would allow the viewer to participate in the programming, after Marshall McLuhan’s ideals, seeing television as a future global communication system. Ryan: “We made tapes as a collective and showed them at a loft on East Twenty-Second Street in Manhattan. Some of these black-and-white ‘raw’ tapes are still extant in the Raindance Archive.”[364] Among the tapes from that period were a documentation of 1970’s Earth Day in New York; Rays, a tape made on a California beach; and material which dealt with surveillance video then used in supermarkets. Raindance was one of the many video groups at the time which were predominantly concerned with presenting pure information. The Alternative Media Center, Global Village, Video-freex, and People’s Video Theatre were other groups that tried to invent new ways of using video to mediate social conflict.[365] Their interest was above all social and political. Raindance Corporation purposively set out to develop alternative approaches to the television structure. With this in mind they videotaped political rallies and unions, protests, social injustice, street life, and so forth, and also published Radical Software (1970-1974). At the time, Paul Ryan was convinced that portable video presented a true weapon for cultural transformation. In Radical Software (Spring 1971), he announced that the concerns of portable video were comparable to those of guerrilla warfare, in which the guerrilla fighter generally moves invisibly, and attacks by surprise and in unexpected places, because he knows the terrain. Ryan looks back at this text as a bit of an ‘angry text,’ written in a rhetoric that was mostly determined by his anger about the Vietnam War.

Practically, the ‘guerrilla warfare’ groups saw their chances with cable television (CATV), which was rapidly becoming a major business in the early seventies. The point of view was that cable television’s business lay in the cultivation of local culture, and that the role of a cable system was to increase the community’s awareness of their existing local cultural system, whereby the possibilities of its public access would give more power over the local situation, i.e. cable would allow people to have input, extend control over local politics, local culture, etc. Ryan commented: “Just as VTR extends man as a cybernator so cable can enlarge the capacity of the local culture to communicate about and control its development. This control can include some decisions about importing information. ... Low priced portable video units make it possible for the cable company to take their whole district as their studio. Feeding back into the culture rather than feeding off it will insure lasting relations between cable and culture”[366] For Paul Ryan it went without saying that the pervasive influence of broadcast television had to be counteracted and that video had come right in time to function as a tool of protest. The ‘video belief system’ of this group can be deduced quite clearly from the editorial statement written by Michael Shamberg for the Radical Software issue on “Guerilla Television,” and it is worth quoting: “In issue one, volume one of Radical Software (Summer 1970) we introduced the hypothesis that people must assert control over the information tools and processes that shape their lives in order to free themselves from the mass manipulation perpetrated by commercial media in this country and state controlled television abroad. By accessing lowcost 1/2” portable videotape equipment to produce or create or partake in the information gathering process, we suggest that people would contribute greatly to restructuring their own information environments.”[367]

Paul Ryan switched to electronic technology in 1967, giving up a career as a writer, in order to avoid more Vietnams, following the idea put forth by McLuhan that the new electronic communication media would bring a more harmonious society. In 1966, Ryan had been drafted to go to Vietnam. As an activist strongly opposed to the Vietnam War he asked for alternative service, and his request to work at Fordham’s Communications Center where Marshall McLuhan was appointed visiting professor (1967-1968) was granted.[368] There were a number of aspects in McLuhan’s thinking that fascinated him. Being a writer, he was intrigued by McLuhan’s disregard of linear sequence and the fact that he quoted at will any reference at any time to make a point. (Note that the writings of Robert Smithson also showed this tendency.) However, perceiving similar qualities in electronic technology, he started to experiment with portable video equipment and tried to use this new medium to fashion a non-linear way of thinking. As an (almost) political activist, the economic and political implications of portable video were self-evident to him. The idea was that, because video was a self-contained system, it could deal with culture’s processes by itself, whether family, classroom, therapy, or cultural issues at large. In opposition to television, it allowed one to raise issues that seemed important to the individual person or the group, etc. As a consequence of the controversial information that was broadcast via the networks, and considering the conflicts that arose about American foreign policies during the Vietnam War, people began to doubt that they were being told the truth about the death of relatives, for example. This questioning of the information led implicitly to the following questions: what else is whithheld, by whom and why? How is this system of communication maintained by those in power? And how does power function ?

If the new portable video system was seen as a practical instrument to get access to controlling the flow of information by means of ‘guerrilla warfare’ systems, some kind of theoretical foundation was wanting, if one wanted to be successful in countering the established structure of the television networks at all. Consequently, Ryan set out to define the utilization of the new medium video in relation to the cybernetic and media theories of Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan, what he thought relevant in their ideas: “Cybernetics understands that power is distributed throughout the system. Relevant pathways shift and change with the conditions. ... Cybernetic guerilla warfare...because the tool of portable video is a cybernetic extension of man and because cybernetics is the only language of intelligence and power that is ecologically viable.”[369] In the meantime, he had met Gregory Bateson at a conference in 1970, and his ideas that the cybernetic circuit as the basic unit of mind could be identified with the basic unit of evolutionary survival had impressed him deeply.

An Evolutionary Tool for Education

Since then Paul Ryan’s video works have taken a distinct direction. Starting with video as a medium for personal change, as a medium that allows one to experience personal power, he subsequently moved to a level where this ‘power’ is used for social change. This is the road that he has consistently pursued to create a body of theoretical writings and video works that involve the creation of a new “information-transmission system based on shared perceptions of environmental realities rather than on language.”[370] Ryan’s perception of video as an evolutionary tool for social change had been enlarged by the notion that this change should be accompanied by a growing ecological awareness. And these concerns about the earth and its ecology have remained central issues in his work; in fact they became the content of his work. The concern for the earth and its ecological systems was, interestingly, also a dominant feature of the contributions of Radical Software between 1972 and 1974.

It became clear to him that if he wanted to make some of guerrilla television’s goals come true, it was necessary to seriously investigate the roles which the ‘new medium’ video could play in education, as Nam June Paik had already indicated. Ryan, coming from a group that sought ways to produce alternative television, first thought of the possible educational functions of cable television. It became a central element in his future concepts. Only, the cable industry had to be convinced of the necessity of this function. Although he has expanded his visions to include other environments as well, a major part of his work now consists of the development of a teachable method for cable-TV or television that will put forth “video interpretations of the natural world” in view of a communication that takes into account the complexity of the earth’s ecological systems.[371] The development of his thinking, he says, was basically formed by the semiotic theories of Charles S. Peirce and by Gregory Bateson’s application of cybernetics in the social sciences. Peirce is considered the father of American semiotics. He became known for the development of a logic of signs, which proposes a scientifically formulated classification system of the sciences. It is in essence a logic of relationships, which researches the system by which objects are created and connected by relationships of any kind.[372] Peirce’s starting point is that all living human beings share the same world, and that they (we) carry the responsibility for this world. For human beings are the only living beings who can consciously decide what to do and where to go, and decide how this world is going to look. This common experience allows us to share information, or knowledge, and thus to develop a common perspective for understanding. Gregory Bateson’s research has focused on the nature of man and his relationship to the environment. His interdisciplinary studies, whether in his own field anthropology, or linguistics, biology, perceptual and behavioral psychology, eventually all aimed at creating a classification of contexts of behavior by applying cybernetic principles. Bateson proposed, among other, that all biological and evolving systems, that is individual organisms, animal and human societies, eco-systems..., “consist of complex cybernetic networks, and all such systems share formal characteristics.”[373] His wide-ranging interests also led him to research the nature of learning processes, such as biological adaptation, or the acquiring of knowledge, and its connection with evolutionary processes. Why is one idea at a certain time given preference over another, for example. Is there indeed some natural selection process at work here? Bateson maintained, in contradiction to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, that the unit of survival was not the family line or the (sub)species, but “the unit of survival is organism plus environment. ... a very strange and surprising identity emerges: the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind.”[374] Since in his vision the mind is immanent in the large biological system or eco-system, and biological structures (living organisms) and grammar (as a product of mind) can both be classified as products of a communicational and organizational process, Bateson deduced “that this massive aggregation of threats to man and his ecological systems arises out of errors in our habits of thought at deep and partly unconscious levels.”[375] Basically from these concepts Paul Ryan evolved the idea that it must be possible to make conscious the unconsciously shared levels of perception about the ecological environment.

Inspired by Warren McCulloch’s concept of calculus of intention, Ryan began research on communication and behavioral patterns among groups that consisted of three people (1971-1975). Warren McCulloch was a mathematician/cybernetician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had specialized in research on brain circuits. He had come to the conclusion that communication in a dialogue largely broke down because human beings lacked a logic of handling relationships in group of three or larger, called “triadic relationships.” ,[376][377] Paul Ryan began a series of videotapes in which he experimented with people’s interactions in sets of three. From there he developed the concept of a “triadic logic” as a relational practice among groups divided in threes. Via this relational practice, Ryan thought that it might be possible to build a communications system based on a shared perception of the environmental realities which we live in. The only thing needed, according to him, was to make people aware of this shared perception. This triadic logic was to have a direct educational purpose. Concerning the videotapes, he said: “I trained myself to do half hour continuous tapes of the environment in a Zen state of mind. I did a set of 36 such tapes dealing with earth, air, water, plants, animals and man, considered in his technologies” (1973-1976). He had learnt the practice of T’ai Chi and meditation. The result of this period were The Triadic Tapes, 12 hours of black-and-white videotape, and Earthscore Sketch, 18 hours of black-and-white videotape, divided into 36 continuous half-hour segments, both of which were shown on Manhattan Cable, and presented at the Kitchen’s Performance Space (1976). In 1975, he did a year-long study of a waterfall in High Falls, New York, watching waterflow patterns, which he edited down from thirteen hours to an hour-long videotape titled Water Chreods (“chre = necessary; “ode” = path in Greek). Chreods are nature’s basic pathways or patterns. By systematically observing the patterns underlying a particular eco-system, Ryan set up a vocabulary of chreods which “can give us an articulate set of notes with which to ‘score’ natural phenomena. ... The syntax of interrelationships between these chreods would, in effect, constitute the ‘score’ for that particular system.”[378] The artist does not emphasize the themes recurring in his work. He prefers that his work not be dealt with thematically, as he feels it might harm the idea of a (dis)continuous evolutionary development. However, it is worth mentioning that the artist has repeatedly returned to the theme of water, “as the richest single source for developing a vocabulary of ‘chreods’ in nature. ... Water takes so many different shapes - billows, droplets, backcurls, waves, fantails, and cascades - and each of these shapes exhibits a different pathway in which water can flow, a different chreod...”[379] In 1983, he did a study of the Great Falls in Paterson, New York, which resulted in the videotape Where the Water Splits the Bank (1985). It was followed by a study of the coast of Cape Ann, Boston in 1984, with a tape of the same name, Coast of Cape Ann. In 1986 Ryan crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a North Sea trawler, taping over 30 hours of ocean waters. Yet another videotape, entitled Mountain Waters, interprets different water ecologies in the Shawangunk Mountains north of New York City. The last one in this series, Water Fire Water (1993), relates sets of water ‘chreods’ and fire ‘chreods.’

Paul Ryan denotes the time that he lived in the Shawangunk Mountains (1971-1975) as his early earthscore period, as the time in which he found a formal basis for using video as a means to evolve and develop new learning patterns for human behavior and perception. “The name Earthscore indicates my assumption that ecological systems, like musical systems, are made up of ‘notes’ and that humans can interpret these notes with video.” The Earthscore model is, among other things, based on the principle that people can and do process information according to the uniqueness of their perceptual systems. He connected the cybernetic concept of self-correction (a classic example is the thermostat, or the temporature of the human body) with Charles Peirce’s concepts of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Firstness is defined by Peirce as there being no regard for the other, secondness as correspondence to the/an other, for example, there is a reaction, and thirdness as the correlation between firstness and secondness: there is mediation, or discourse. After experimenting with his own triadic model that he had set up using the video as tool of communication between three persons, so that communication was thus defined as a set of interacting patterns of behavior, Ryan came to the following conclusion: “I think that there are two interrelated possibilities: the invention and maintenance of a repertoire of behavior patterns that would work self-correctively for three people and the construction of an information system based on shared perception of environmental realities. ... In terms of the self-corrective triadic behavior, what it seems possible to develop is a ‘practice’ in the Oriental sense of the word. In the Occidental sense, one practices in order to acquire a skill, e.g. to be able to shoot an arrow straight. That skill is then a new tool, which you, unchanged, now have. In the Oriental understanding, you practice in order to change yourself. By incorporating a discipline relevant to archery into yourself, you become, out of practice, a different person... three people could incorporate video and video feedback into their interaction and change the ‘normal’ pattern of three party differentiation into an on-going self-corrective process. The people themselves would also change.”[380] This quotation shows how Ryan goes about connecting an idea from Peirce’s semiotic system and from Bateson’s cybernetic notion of a self-corrective circuit applied to human behavior with his own model of triadic logic, with the intention of creating a shared perception of environmental realities and a view of the ecological environment as a whole, including man and nature, as the condition necessary to accomplish social and cultural change. It is also the key to the further development of his Earthscore Notational System. Ryan: “The Earthscore Notational System grew out of my efforts to use video to interpret nature ... to produce an orchestration of perception. ... In effect the Earthscore Notation provides the architectural plans for developing an information transmission system based on shared perception of the natural world and not speech or writing.”[381]

The Earthscore System as Video-Ecology

In 1977, Paul Ryan went to San Francisco to meet with a group called the Frisco Bay Mussel Group. This group stood for bioregionalism, which can be defined as an involvement that cultivates strategies for sustaining living in the context of local ecologies. The group’s involvement was above all political and by that time had exchanged its early utopian community ideals for a functional way of operating to achieve its goals.[382] At the time the bioregional approach was new and important, because it viewed the eco-system of the bay as a whole. Ryan was particularly interested in 1. the practical view of developing strategies to sustain what was called “a culture of place,” and 2. the theoretical foundations of bioregionalism, offering a possible connection to cybernetic theory.[383] Meanwhile he had also learnt about James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis. Lovelock perceives the earth as a living organism, not in the metaphorical sense, but cybernetically. According to Lovelock, the phenomena that determine the ‘organic’ balance on earth, such as atmospheric conditions, like temperature and oxygen/nitrogen ratio, are based on self-corrective feedback mechanisms on a planetary scale.[384] The Gaia Hypothesis suggests that we have - or can acquire in a reasonable frame of time - an operative knowledge of these planetary mechanisms, and that we can learn to identify them, and thus eliminate errors that we have made related to processes in nature, or planet earth. It is not a free ticket for those who might think that the earth will therefore adapt to whatever circumstances. Lovelock has been criticized for the theoretical possibility of the implication. On the contrary, his theories really imply a new ethical understanding, as opposed to the position, still often held, that science is value-free. The Gaia Hypothesis - science has had to accept at least a few of Lovelock’s theses - reminds the scientist-researcher to keep asking how far one can go before the self-corrective mechanism can no longer return to its original position.

In 1979 Paul Ryan moved to North Jersey again, and decided to start Talking Wood, a magazine advancing these principles.[385] In order not to remain stuck in theoretical rhetoric about the destruction of the environment, such as ‘if we destroy our environment we will destroy ourselves,’ the organization initiated a Watershed Watch, which relied on Ryan’s concept of “a shared perception of the watershed by the people living here, ... suggesting a (new) way of coordinating our natural watchfulness of the place we live in, connecting multiple aspects of the site methodically and relationally, as circuit.”[386] Talking Wood was structured as a public activity, using Peirce’s categories and the notion of a relational circuit as design concept, to make people aware of the various ecological elements of the Passaic River Watershed. The organization’s strategy was to work directly with the local population, through workshops and lectures, identifying problems concerning the eco-systems that deserved attention. Objects of study were among others the flood problems in the Passaic River Basin, and developing a program for making the city of Paterson a so-called ‘green city.’ The Passaic Watershed Watch set up an interdisciplinary design group to do an engineering study to meet flood control and associated water-related land resource needs of the people of Passaic River Basin. The use of video and television as educational tools were central elements in the proposals and workshops, being considered, of course, the most effective contemporary means of communication. The positive results of some of the projects undertaken were an affirmation that at least small groups of people were now taking responsibility for the public habitat. These activities can be seen as part of a more or less continuing development toward yet another ‘shift’ in activities, as Ryan began to work full scale on the design of a 24 hour television channel dedicated to monitoring the ecology: the Ecochannel. Again, it fell together with a move, this time to Hoboken, New Jersey. The thoughts for this project were developed between 1981 and 1985.

Design for an Ecochannel

The focal point in the proposals, or ‘designs,’ which Paul Ryan has been developing during the past five or six years, is the development of an ecological consensus, which is in fact a continuation of his earlier premise of the creation of “shared perceptions of environmental realities.” The Design for Ecological Consensus along the Hudson has as its overall goal the achievement of an ongoing consensus about the ecology of the Hudson River among the parties interested, the regulatory agencies responsible, and the general public. The starting point is again to create a design that will lead to a perceptual congruence of the whole environment as an ecological system. A communication system will be created to discuss what it means to live in accord with the ecology of the Hudson on a longterm basis.

The design - also called Environmental Mediation - is set up to provide a context that would make it easier to talk about and handle disputes in conflict situations between the body politic, environmental organizations, the industry and other interest groups, as well as the public at large. Environmental Mediation is set up as follows: 1. it will use a neutral third party - thus based on the logic of triadic relationships -, to formally create a formal neutral set of relationships, 2. it is based on a jury of observers which may preclude advocacy in favor of one or the other party, 3. it is set up to create a circle or circuit of understanding which “could produce an architectural basis of an information management system...”[388] Ryan’s vision is that the method could be embedded in a computer program of a database network system that would help orchestrate communication, in this case about the Hudson ecology, and make that communication available to anyone with a personal computer. What it means in terms of educational practice is that the whole ecology - or at least as many aspects of the eco-system as possible - may be used as a common reference for different subject areas taught, including science, mathematics, literature, social studies and art. Being an interdisciplinary and experimental method, Ryan explains, it comprises four components: 1. the ecological setting itself, 2. the learning about ecology by facts, patterns and context (Peirce’s firstness, secondness and thirdness), 3. the system of knowledge already available, and 4. as a cooperative learning procedure, he hopes that it might ultimately create the ‘new’ way of thinking that Gregory Bateson had envisioned as “the ecology of mind.”

Among his recent proposals is the New York City Environmental Television Channel, called NEST (New York City Ecochannel for a Sustainable Tomorrow) with the purpose “to monitor and interpret the eco-systems that support New York City, so the citizens of New York can develop ecologically sound policies and practices.”[389] In answer to the question why he considers television the appropriate medium to achieve his goals, Ryan says, that for him television functions as an “electronic window on city ecologies and thus can develop a shared perception of how these ecologies work, as well as an understanding of how not to destroy them. ... Television, because television enables us to monitor events simultaneously with others, and this is what tv does best.”[390]

The artist cofounded and directed the Gaia Institute at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, and has also joined the Earth Environmental Group, a non-profit organization dedicated to environmental concerns at large.[391] The need for environmental education is urgent and has to be far-reaching. An example of work related to these theoretical and educational methods is Nature in New York City (1989). In this videotape the spectator is taken to four different natural habitats. Site one is Jamaica Bay, the Gateway National Recreation Area where the horsehoe crabs lay their eggs. One first sees the laying of the eggs, signifying the forthcoming birth of new crabs, and thus the procreation of the species. The artist explains this as Peirce’s firstness. This process can be interrupted by predators, i.e. animals, human beings (Peirce’s secondness). Finally, we learn that it is part of a pattern, including the crabs’ life cycle, as well as the human/urban environment (Peirce’s thirdness). Site two shows Clay Pit Pond, at Clay Pit Pond State Reserve, Staten Island. Here, the artist selected five phenomena present at the site: deciduous trees, evergreen trees, abandoned cars, grass and reeds. The spectator’s ‘eye’ sees the surface of the pond and aspects of its surroundings to get an impression of their qualities (firstness). This section is followed by a more detailed description, functioning as factual information of the five phenomena (secondness). Finally, a visualization of patterns and relationships between vegetation, human intervention and the pond is created (thirdness). Site three shows a group of trees in Inwood Hill Park forest (Manhattan, NYC). Ryan videotaped the natural phenomena ‘pure,’ such as the melting of snow, the barks of the trees, green elements (firstness). The viewer is then confronted with indications of the presence of men such as burnt wood, litter left (secondness), and the tape ends with children playing among the trees (thirdness). Site four presents a waterfall in the Bronx River, at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Here the artist focused first on the water itself, its surface qualities (firstness), then on the turbulance, the structure of the water as a waterfall (secondness), and thirdly on the explicit water patterns and the geological context of the falls (thirdness). On a compositional level, Nature in New York City uses what Ryan has referred to as “the relational circuit,” an organizing mode of composing the knowledge obtained according to the categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. The purpose of Ryan’s notational system is that it helps us to identify errors in our treatment of an ecosystem, by learning to understand the underlying patterns. For example, the crabs lay their eggs in the wet sand during the extended ebb tibes when there is a full moon in June. This way maximum protection for the eggs during the birthing process is assured. But when this “figure of regulation, a chreod, is destroyed, the natural process is destroyed.”[392]

Paul Ryan has moved from ‘guerrilla warfare,’ whose tactics are secretive and take one by surprise, to a strategy that includes open discussion. He has taken up a position as an artist, not as a social worker, or environmentalist or ecologist, although his work covers large parts of the territories of these professions. In this, his position resembles Alan Sonfist’s, who has moved into the territory of the landscape architect, and who is now often called an ecologist/artist. His approach is that of an artist, not of an educator, although he spends most of his time teaching. The “threeing” practice has been successfully applied by Ryan in art and educational programs since 1976. Recently he has used the Earthscore Notation and specifically the triadic logic to design and train others to teach a course for workers displaced by the defense industry, for ETI, a 12 million dollar employment and training company. Paul Ryan has developed Earthscore into a “method for generating curriculum for education for sustainability; design of learning experience, ‘composing’ my art in a non art context.”[393]

Many artists in the United States hold teaching positions, but for most of them it is just a job, a way of earning a living. For Ryan, education is part of his art work, if not the central part. Again, for him education is not restricted to what we usually think; it includes a new approach to teaching, which one might define as an interdisciplinary systems approach, with the intent to create an ecology of mind. His central theme is the ecology of the earth, running as a continuous thread through his video work and thinking. One may compare Paul Ryan with Helen and Newton Harrison, as they share similar concerns, and whose work also has an educational component. The Harrisons also work on an interdisciplinary systemic level, taking into account both nature’s eco-systems and human conditions. Yet the Harrisons have presented the major part of their work in an art context, Ryan rarely has. Paul Ryan will show his work in museums and galleries upon invitation, but he is not at all interested in art politics or its commercial aspects. After all, he is not making art objects that can be put on display. The much broader context of society is his domain. In essence, one could place Paul Ryan among a new category of artists who have been defined by Gene Youngblood as metadesigners, and who set out to create new contexts to replace or function as an overlay upon existing ones.