about the artist: Michael O'Callaghan

Michael O'Callaghan is the founder and director of the Global Vision project. He is a Swiss-born Irish information-artist, film producer / director, environmental campaigner, author, and consultant. He is an autodidact with a trans-disciplinary background in systems theory, cybernetics, anthropology, psychology, sustainable development, art, music, and media production, with 40 years of engagement in the global movement for a sustainable future. He sees the world as a self-organising system. He is convinced that beyond the global crisis, a sustainable future is still possible on this planet, provided we can imagine it, have prior agreement on the goal, trust in our human nature, and take responsibility for the major eco-social changes that are so urgently needed to bring it forth.

He sees the global crisis as a cognitive, psycho-cultural and artistic challenge. His primary interest is to create related contexts of information or situations which evoke the pattern that connects the global crisis to our own way of seeing it.

Michael conceived the Global Vision project in 1972, and founded Global Vision Corporation, a Non Governmental Organisation accredited to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (since renamed Division for Sustainable Development, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs), to implement the project in 1982. He was a founding Fellow of the Sustainable Development Initiative (SDI) at Columbia Business School in 1996. He is a former Boardmember of Friends of the United Nations, a former member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Commission on Environment and Communication (CEC), a former member of the United Nations Department of Public Information annual NGO conference planning committee. He is also the founder of the GM-free Ireland Network, and a member of Slow Food.

His work is supported by an international network of partners and sponsors.

Websites:

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Global Vision: www.global-vision.org

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GM-free Ireland: www.global-vision.org

Facebook: facebook.com/MichaelinoOC

Autobiography:

Quick links to sections below: in production • in development • texts • filmography • conferences • consulting • astroarchaeology • other

I was born of Irish parents at Geneva, Switzerland in 1952, where my late father was a diplomat with the United Nations' International Labour Organisation (ILO), and my mother Fiona a medical doctor. Both their families are from Inishowen in Donegal, the territory of her O'Doherty clan which traces its history back at least 1,800 years in Ireland, and many centuries before that in Spain. My grandfather Senator Joseph O'Doherty and my grandmother Dr. Margaret Claire Irvine were involved in Ireland's 1916 Easter Rising which brought independence from the British Empire. He was also a member of the First Dáil or Parliament in 1919.

Geneva in the 1950s was probably the most supercosmopolitan place on Earth, with a large international community working with the United Nations, U.N. agencies, embassies, international organisations, and transnational corporations. The second world war was over, and their mission was to build a new world of collaboration and peace. Like most children in this expat community, my formative linguistic environment was polyglot: I heard English, French, Italian and Irish spoken daily for a couple of years before I learned to speak myself. I remember, as a pre-verbal infant, noticing that each language creates a slightly different world, and that grownups often confuse their verbal map with the territory. I was disappointed with my kindergarten, where our teachers made us copy handwritten sentences in cursive script, without first bothering to inform us where one letter ended and the next one began. I then went to a progressive Montessori pre-school where my classmates and I were research subjects for Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist well known for his theory of cognitive development and epistemological studies with children, and for his famous 1934 statement "Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual".

I went to French-speaking primary school in Geneva (where I also studied music at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève), then did a year at the German-speaking 800-year old Benedictine abbey school at Stift Melk in Austria. I had my secondary education in Ireland with the Benedictines at Glenstal, from which I emerged with various certificates in art, music, English, French and German literature, Irish, Latin, mathematics, geometry, physics, chemistry, biology, botany, and zoology (including a Special Paper in Ecology).

I got into cinema during my 1960's school breaks as a teenager in Geneva, particularly Bergman, Pasolini, Antonioni, Buñuel and Godard. This was the time of Brigitte Bardot; the U.S. war in Vietnam; Nixon; Kissinger; Mao's China; civil rights; free speech peace and love in the USA; the Prague Spring; May 68 in Paris; the moon landing; surfing in California; rock & roll, sexual liberation and psychedelics.

In 1970, intending to become a doctor, I went to study pre-medicine at Trinity College Dublin, but didn't like the fact that the subject was still being taught through the mechanistic paradigm of Newtonian physics, which had already become outdated some decades before. After TCD refused to let me change course to study ecology and economics together (because "these two subjects have nothing to do with each other"), I switched to French and Italian literature (and liked the Theatre of the Absurd). I dropped out during my second year after feeling that most of my teachers had little appreciation for what Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Ionesco and Pirandello had to say, in a world that badly needed thinking about.

In 1972, I conceived the Global Vision movie project during an astro-archaeological field trip to the ancient ruined megalithic cairn known as Nial Du's grave near the summit of Tibradden in the Dublin Mountains, high over the bay city below. Mentioned by Robert Graves, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, this ancient artwork is so constructed that an observer can still perceive the sun rising over the horizon of the Irish sea in alignment with the monument's passage at dawn on Summer Solstice - thousands of years after the monument's construction. I saw this artwork as a situation or context of information, whose experience evoked the relatively recent historical emergence of the 1,000-year old city of Dublin from the surrounding landscape, and its physical relation - via the surrounding ecosystem - to the star on which all life on Earth ultimately depends.

In 1973 I went to live with a few close friends at a beautiful place called Lough Bray in the Wicklow Mountains, as part of the Hippie counterculture back-to-nature movement of the time. I embarked on an independent learning project to try to understand how information about Dublin's metabolism and footprint on the surrounding ecosystem/bioregion was processed through the body politic of that city. I soon discovered that this wild mountain countryside was not immune from the fallout of urban civilisation, including acid rain from industrial factories in the British Midlands and Germany's Ruhr Valley, and radioactive fallout from the French Government's atmospheric hydrogen bomb explosions on the other side of the world at Mururoa atoll in the South Pacific!

Realising there was nowhere to hide from the urban problem, I turned my attention towards the exploration of innovative and artistic ways of using communications technology to enable the inhabitants of cities to become more conscious of the impact of their behaviour on the global ecosystem on which their survival depends, and take responsibility for effecting the necessary eco-social transformation. This catalysed my interest in cybernetics, autopoiesis, psychology, pattern recognition, communications, anthropology and global affairs - which sounds complicated but really just means being seriously curious about our way of seeing the world, and the synergetic psycho-economic-political-security-environmental effects of our personal worldviews as they ripple out throughout the cultural lattice of the global body politic and Noosphere. I was aware that Humankind is crossing the threshold of the global age, and that our assumptions, beliefs and blind spots affect future generations.

By 1974 I was reading Carl Jung (Man and his Symbols), Buckminster Fuller (Utopia or Oblivion), R.D. Laing (The Divided Self), Gregory Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind), Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception), Ivan Illich (Tools for Conviviality), Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message), Paolo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Stafford Beer (Brain Of The Firm, Robert Graves (The White Goddess), Lao Tse (Tao Te Ching), Gary Snyder (Earth House Hold), Han Shan (Cold Mountain Poems), and the visionary media critic Gene Youngblood (Expanded Cinema).

I briefly studied lithography at the Istituto Statale d'Arte in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, and vernacular architecture whilst restoring the 12th-century Castello di Cennina in Tuscany. I also was fortunate to spend some time with indigenous peoples in the Kulu "Valley of the Gods" in the Indian Himalayas near the border with Tibet, in Afghanistan (before the Russian invasion), and at the (then pristine) tropical coral reef lagoon beach hamlet of Unawatuna on the Indian Ocean near the Southern tip of Sri Lanka. This helped me view modern industrial civilisation in the context of its historical emergence through pre-urban culture, urbanisation, colonialism, development, technology, and the globe-girdling industrial civilisation of the 20th century.

In 1975, I went to New York to do some research for the style and content of my proposed Global Vision movie, intending to return to Ireland to make the film there with my friend Meiert Avis (who subsequently co-founded Windmill Lane Studios and became the king of music video).

New York was then the cultural capital of the planet, alive with cinema, video art, theatre, music, fashion, money, politics publishing and media, and hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. Information density was high, with criss crossing global networks of interest, including transnational companies, international NGOs, UN agencies etc. NYC seemed like the place where the world was getting to know itself. I decided to stay awhile.

In 1976 I set up the Biosynergy Foundation to fund the research for my film project, and became friends with the Academy Award-winning avant-guarde film artist and time-lapse pioneer Hilary Harris (see his films The Nuer, 9 Variations on a Dance Theme, and Organism. (The latter was of particular interest re. the Global Vision movie, and was also the cinematographic precursor of Godfrey Reggio's landmark film Koyaanisqatsi, whose New York scenes were also filmed by Harris with a soundtrack by John Cage). I also became friends with the visionary architect Louise Dees-Porch, who was an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, and participated in the immensely inspiring annual World Game workshops organised by the inventer / designer / architect / philosopher Buckminster Fuller, whom Marshall McLuhan described as "the Leonardo Da Vinci of the 20th century". Here I met a number of visionary thinkers including the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis who re-wrote the evolutionary history of early life on Earth, re-classified the diversity of biological phyla, and significantly contributed to the Gaia Hypothesis developed by James Lovelock; the experimental phycisist and world's leading renewable energy and resource efficiency expert Amory B. Lovins of MIT who subsequently went on to found Rocky Mountain Institute; and the futurist and economist Hazel Henderson.

In 1978 I published the first proposal for my Global Vision film under the working title State of the Planet, with Hilary Harris signed on as co-director. The proposal was distributed to 200 leading thinkers, CEOs of transnational corporations, Universities and UN Agencies, along with a newsletter called Global Vision - which subsequently became the name of the project. We received enthusiastic feedback and offers of support from many sources including the afore-mentioned Buckminster Fuller and Hazel Henderson; United Nations Under Secretary General Robert Muller who subsequently set up the U.N. University for Peace and won the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education; Nobel Peace laureate Seán McBride (co-founder of Amnesty International and also Chairman and President of the International Peace Bureau); the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell; medical anthropologist Joan Halifax (author of Shamanic Voices: A survey of visionary Narratives, who subsequently founded Upaya House institute and Zen center in Santa Fé, New Mexico); World Future Society co-founder Barbara Marx Hubbard (now President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution); the late Ron Anastasia who founded the Appropriate Technology Group at MIT; Robert A. Smith III, the meta-networker and Organizational Behavior Analyst at NASA for the Apollo moon landings and Hubble telescope; and Aurelio Peccei, the Olivetti CEO and founder of the Club of Rome (which had just published its landmark Limits to Growth report).

Now aged 26, I knew the Global Vision project was both artistically and financially feasible, but I realised the need for further research and learning in a variety of relevant fields before I would be ready to make the film. I thus decided to find out more about information theory, cybernetics, anthropology, epistemology, renewable energy, environmentally sound technology, holistic medicine, sustainable agriculture, transpersonal psychology, communications technology, video art and independent film-making. I had interesting discussions with R.F. Rhine and Carl Negus at Patterns and Systems Inc., who designed information display systems for US military battle managers based on new understandings about human pattern-recognition. I was an avid reader of the Radical Software publications about the community-buidling potential of decentralised video and TV production, and first used online communication in 1977 with Murray Turoff's EIES Electronic Information Exchange System, which made me understand the internet's revolutionary potential for a quantum leap in global cultural interconnectivity before it was invented.

The next step was to research public hopes and fears about the global future, through meetings, conferences, workshops, seminars and video interviews with leading thinkers from different fields. I had recently collaborated with video artist Wendy Clarke on her ground-breaking interactive video exhibit Love Tapes, in which hundreds of members of the general public recorded their answer to the question "What do you think about love?", whilst sitting alone watching their live image on a video monitor in a specially constructed booth in the lobby of the World Trade Center. Each night for two weeks, our selection of these tapes was broadcast back to the public on Manhattan Cable TV, making front page headlines in the New York Post. Inspired by the potential of interactive video, I then created Future Tapes, an interactive video exhibit of 3-minute video statements from ordinary people and leading thinkers answering the question "how do you feel about the future?", at various locations around the USA. Participants included Buckminster Fuller, paleontologist Richard E. Leakey, psychiatrist R.D. Laing (see also his Wikipedia reference), evolutionary philosopher Thomas Berry, economist / futurist Hazel Henderson, U.N. Under Secretary-General Robert Müller, evolutionary economist and systems theorist Kenneth E. Boulding, Helena Norberg-Hodge who founded the International Society for Ecology & Culture and the counter-development Ladakh Project on the Tibetan Plateau, journalist and Interlink Press Service founder Brennon Jones (who subsequently edited An Inside Look at the United Nations), Multinational Monitor editor Philip Frazer, U.S. Center for Defense Information founder Rear Admiral Gene La Roque (rtd), and Physicians for Social Responsibility founder Dr. Helen Caldicott, whose campaign led to the Limited Nuclear Test Ban treaty and won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

During these early days in New York, I also briefly taught a Masters Sociology course on The impact of media on everyday life at New York's cutting-edge New School for Social Research, and produced a cable TV pilot for the The Advocate Weekly, a progressive newspaper chain in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

I attended conferences in a variety of fields including the first conference on Appropriate Technology at the University of Massachusetts / Amherst in 1978; various gatherings of the World Future Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the U.S. Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, the Association for Humanistic Psychology; and the International Transpersonal Association's brilliant first conference near Boston, where I met psychiatrists Stan Grof and John Weir Perry, both of whom later joined the Global Vision project's board of advisers. I participated in seminars and workshops at the Lindisfarne Association set up by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, including discussions with Ivan Illich and Mary Catherine Bateson, and a course of intensive study with the brilliant paradigm-shifting neurobiologist Francisco Varela (who co-founded the theory of autopoiesis to define the characterisics of self-organising systems). I also had a very interesting lunch with Erich Jantsch, who had just published his book The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution.

In 1981 I changed the name of my movie project from State of the Planet to Global Vision and defined the structure of its content in artistic terms: an impressionistic documentary musical feature film conceived as a Collective self-portrait of humankind and the biosphere - a concept without precedent in art or motion picture history. The film is also designed to evoke the psychological process of worldview formation and transformation, and the fear of the future and images of world-destruction-and-renewal which often come to the surface of consciousness in times of personal change and social crisis.

To explore the latter subject further, I wrote a little book called When the Dream Becomes Real: Visions of Apocalypse in Mythology, Madness and the Future, which includes his widely disseminated A conversation with the psychiatrist Dr. John Weir Perry. (The rest of the book is being reformatted for PDF and will soon be available for download here.)

In 1981 - when the US-Soviet nuclear arms race was in full swing - I also took part in the first meeting of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, where Suzanne B. Greason and I conducted an interactive video exhibit featuring exclusive interviews with leading doctors from around the world who were campaigning against nuclear weapons because of their health dangers, including IPPNV co-founder Dr. Helen Caldicott from Australia, Breshnev's cardiologist Dr. Yevgeniy Chazov who was a member of the USSR Politbureau and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Dr. Raisuke Shirabi who survived the atom bomb at Nagasaki, and Kremlin insider Georgi Arbatov whose keynote speech began with the sentence "You capitalist system like express train rushing to cliff. But... we shall overtake you!" IPNW subsequently won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

Another design challenge for my Collective Self Portrait was the question of how to shape the movie's information content with participatory planning input from leading thinkers around the world. In 1982, I privately circulated the first draft of the participatory planning manual for the film, designed for the project's participants to collaborate in shaping its information content in a way that would be meaningful to the global public, enable its viewers to become more conscious of their fundamental assumptions and beliefs about the world situation, and focus their attention on the connection between the global crisis and their own way of seeing it. The conceptual framework section of this manual - entitled Global Vision: Cognitive Process in Self-Organising Systems - was described by Development Policy Analyst Hazel Henderson as "one of the most succinct descriptions of the theoretical underpinnings of the societal transformation of human cultures now underway, and why this new worldview must be fostered". The manual is currently being reformatted as a PDF file, but the introduction is available for download under the title The Pattern that Connects.

In 1982 I founded the non-profit Global Vision Corporation to carry on the project with a trans-disciplinary network of advisers, participants and collaborators. This group eventually expanded to include the evolutionary philosopher Thomas Berry who famously said "Humankind is in trouble right now because we don't have a good Story"; M.I.T. professor Donella Meadows, who co-created the global computer systems dynamics model World3 for the Club of Rome's seminal Limits To Growth and Beyond the Limits reports; the Kenyan paleontologist Richard E. Leaky; Santana percussionist Michael Shrieve; film-makers Sheldon Rochlin and Maxine Harris of Mystic Fire Video and some of their friends from the Living Theatre; Velvet Underground drummer and beat poet Angus MacLise; his poet photographer and Bardo Matrix publisher collaborator Ira Cohen; Love Tapes video artist Wendy Clarke; Aquarian Odyssey photographer Don Snyder; poet and multimedia happening artist Gerd Stern, who co-founded the media collective USCO and performed in conjunction with Marshall McLuhan; painter Count Aymon de Roussy de Sales; the Russian monumental sculptor Ernst Neizvestny; U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Gene LaRoque of the Center for Defense Information; Dr. Rick Ingrasci who founded the American Holistic Medical Association, Physicians for Social Responsibility (which won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize), and Hollyhock; Helena Norberg-Hodge, President of the International Society for Ecology & Culture and co-founder of the International Forum on Globalization; the Tarrytown School for Entrepreneurs founder Bob Schwartz; futurist Mary Schoonmaker (who worked with James Ogilvy, Peter Schwartz and Duane Elgin at Willis Harman's Center for the Study of Social Policy at SRI International, which published the seminal book Changing Images of Man (268 pages, 4.1MB PDF download); New Age and The Utne Reader magazine publisher Eric Utne; psychiatrists R. D. Laing, John Weir Perry and Stan Grof; intentional communities expert Ron Anastasia who set up the Apppropriate Technology Group at MIT and created the online journal Posthuman Destines - Science, Culture, Integral Yoga; Prof. Robert Thurman of the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University; Nobel Peace Laureate and UN Spokesperson for Indigenous Peoples, Rigoberta Menchú Tum; philanthropist Margaret Lloyd; anti-nuke campaigner and environmental design consultant Pamela Lippe who founded Earth Day New York and E4 Inc; the visionary Dean James Parks Morton of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine who founded the Interfaith Center of New York; some Fellows of the Lindisfarne Association set up by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson including international law professor Richard Falk of Princeton University, futurist and economist Hazel Henderson, anthropologist Joan Halifax (who now runs the Upaya Institute and Zen Center), and the neurobiologist Francisco Varela (co-founder of the autopoiesis theory of self-organising systems) with whom he studied briefly; the architect William McDonough; social change entrepreneur and conference organiser Marcello Palazzi of the Progressio Foundation; Global Security Institute President Jonathan Granoff; then WHO Director-General Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland (who published the UN's seminal Brundtland Report which led to the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992; David A. Woolcombe, President of Peace Child International; Herbert Girardet, Director of Programmes at the World Future Council, and Chairman of the Schumacher Society UK; the business and environmental leader Maurice Strong, who was Chairman of the Rio Earth Summit; film Director Bernardo Bertolucci; and H.H. the Dalai Lama.

During the 1980s in New York I also became friends with the art dealers Guillaume Gallozzi and Joe La Placa who specialised in graffiti art, British Surrealists, Neo-Romantics and war artists, and solo shows of Graham Sutherland, Brion Gysin and Charles Henri Ford. Joe's own extraordinary artwork was later taken up by Bruno Bischofsberger, and he co-wrote the screenplay for Julian Schnabel's lovely biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat starring David Bowie as Andy Warhol.

The World Wide Web appeared in 1991. Following the UN Earth Summit in 1992, Global Vision Corporation was accredited as a Non Governmental Organisation by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD - now called the Division for Sustainable Development). I then became closely involved with many U.N. programmes and agencies. I developed a range of Global Vision media products with funding from UNDP, UNEP, UNICEF, UNESCO, UNFPA, WHO and other sources. I represented Global Vision at the annual CSD conferences (see his CSD position paper for 1994: Global Strategy: promoting the concept of a sustainable civilisation as a global goal. I was appointed as a member of the United Nations Department of Public Information annual NGO conference planning committee in 1995 and 1996, which brought 1,500 civil society delegates from around the world to the UN for strategic discussions on sustainable development and other global issues. In 1995 I set up the first internet café at the U.N. headquarters in New York. In 1996 I presented my Sustainable City GIS software proposal at the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) in Istanbul (see more on this in the second next paragraph). In 1997 I participated in the UNESCO conference on Environment & Society: Education and Public Awareness for Sustainability, at Thessaloniki, Greece; (see my conference paper: Sustainability: positioning the concept as a global goal and the Declaration of Thessaloniki). In 2002 I shot 25 video interviews with NGO leaders at the U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development (the Rio + 10 conference) in Johannesburg.

In 1993, I produced and directed A Plea for Global Education, a 10-minute video message from Nobel Peace Laureate and UN Spokesperson for Indigenous Peoples Rigoberta Menchú Tum. I was Co-Executive Producer of Fire on the Mountain a documentary film about the connection between consciousness and nature, made by award-winning director David Cherniak at a private gathering of the Dalai Lama, shamans and wisdom-keepers from the spiritual traditions of indigenous peoples from five continents, and high-level representatives of the world's organised religions. I was also a consultant for the five-part TV series Art Meets Science & Spirituality in a Changing Economy: From Fragmentation To Wholeness, directed by Maxine Harris and produced by Sheldon Rochlin and Louwrien Wijers, featuring Joseph Beuys, Robert Filiou, Robert Rauschenberg, John Kage, Marina Abramovic, Stanislov Menshikov, Frijof Kapra, David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake, Ilya Prigogine, Lawrence Weiner, and the Dalai Lama.

In 1994 I represented Global Vision at the International Court of the Environment Foundation conference on global environmental governnance, organised by Italian Supreme Court Judge Amedeo Postiglione in Venice, Italy.

In 1996, I helped set up - and was made a founding Fellow of - the Sustainable Development Initiative (SDI) launched by the late Prof. John Kallos at Columbia Business School in New York. I also developed my above-mentioned proposal for Sustainable City, a GIS software application designed to enable any town or city to measure its metabolism and footprint, and facilitate urban development scenario planning by stakeholders. This was nominated as a best practice at the World Business Forum on Enterprise, the City, and Sustainable Development during the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) in Istanbul.

During my 20 years in the USA, I also lived briefly in Boulder, Colorado, the Berkshire Mountains in upstate New York, Franklin County in Western Massachusetts, Siesta Key in the Gulf of Mexico, San Francisco and Los Angeles and got to know Americans well. For five years (1987-1992) I worked as an archival film specialist at Petrified Films Inc., a New York stock footage house whose library (since acquired by Getty Images / The Image Bank) supplied the international film, TV and advertising industries with a vast catalog of motion picture images including all the outtakes and background plates for every motion pictures filmed by Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures from the 1910s to the 1970s. This includes areal and ground level footage of most of the world's great cities and countrysides, interior and exterior shots of their principal landmarks, and images of their inhabitants for every decade over 100 years. Such archival film footage is of immense significance from an artistic point of view, as we are the first generation to have at our disposal a visual palette which includes the cinematic record of its previous century, enabling us for the first time to "see" social and technological change beyond the limits of our own life time.

One of my close friends in New York was the late photographer Pico Harnden from Cadaqués in Catalonia, whose Russian mother Princess Marie Vassiltchikov, was part of the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, as recounted in her Berlin Diaries. Before I left New York, Pico introduced me to the work of Guy Debord, leader of the Situationist International art movement and author of the brilliant book The Society of the Spectacle and the seminal related film of the same name. This re-kindled my artistic interest in Gene Youngblood's concept of expanded cinema to catalyse the emergence of historical situations that make a difference – particularly through my Global Vision movie.

In 1996 I moved to London to complete the development work on Sustainability: the best investment - a multimedia curriculum package targeted to the global teenager, with help from UNICEF, UNESCO, UNDP, UNEP, UNFPA, WHO, the late Nick Frye of City Screen Cinemas and Working Title Developments, film directors Bernardo Bertolucci and Martin Scorcese, musician Peter Gabriel, urbanist Herbert Girardet, educational textbook producer Kim Richardson, Peace Child International President David Woolcombe, WHO Director-General Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former Chairman of the Rio Earth Summit Maurice Strong and H.H. the Dalai Lama. I received unsolicited multi-million euro sponsorship offers for this project from Shell and BP (and later from EDF) – all of which I declined as attempts to greenwash big oil and nuclear power as "sustainable".

In 1999 I filmed an exclusive video interview with H. H. the Dalai Lama in New Delhi, as part of my proposed documentary Sustainability: the best investment. (A link to this interview will be available here when it is ready.) I also shot segments with Gro Harlem Brundtland, David Woolcombe and Bernardo Bertolucci.

I celebrated the Millennium New Year with Hannah and Maurice Strong at their Crestone home in the Sangre de Christo mountains in Colorado.

In 2001 I moved to Ireland (near Laragh in the Wicklow Mountains) where I intended to go into production on the Sustainability curriculum package in collaboration with Ned O'Hanlon and Maurice Linnane of the Dublin-based Dreamchaser Productions, which produced most of the live shows for U2 (including the spectacular giant McLuhanesque multimedia techno future TV satire video wall for the band's Zoo TV tour) and the first three MTV Europe Music Awards in Berlin, Paris and London. I also intended to go into production on my Sustainable City urban management software application, in collaboration with the world's leading GIS software provider ESRI - Environmental Systems Research Institute.

In 2002 I participated in the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa, where I shot my Rio+10 Interviews with civil society leaders including John Bradin (Progressive Asset Management), Barry Coates (World Development Movement), Felix Dodds (Stakeholder Forum For Our Common Future), Bernward Geier (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements), Jane Goodall (Jane Goodall Institute), Mark Halle (International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development), Randall Hayes (Rainforest Action Network), Jonathan Lash (World Resources Institute), Claude Martin (WWF International), Dr. Wally n'Dow (Habitat II), Helena Norberg-Hodge (International Forum on Globalisation), Rémi Parmentier (Greenpeace International), Danny Schechter (Mediachannel.org), Achim Steiner (IUCN), Kaarin Taipale (ICLEI), Mathis Wackernagel (Redefining Progress), Dr. Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker (Wuppertal Institute), and David Woolcombe (Peace Child International).

In 2003 my life took an unexpected turn: I discovered that the Irish Government was serving as a Trojan Horse to introduce genetically modified food and crops into the EU, against the wishes of the vast majority of the citizens of EU Member States. I considered this national disgrace unacceptable because of the undemocratic nature of the policy, the scientific impossibility of predicting the unintended genetic, health, ecological and economic consequences of GMOs, the growing evidence about their dangers, and the fact that contaminated farmers can be sued for patent infringement. I then put all my other projects on hold to found the GM-free Ireland Network, which campaigns to keep the island of Ireland off-limits to field trials and cultivation of GM crops. The network rapidly grew to include the greatest number and broadest diversity of stakeholders of any NGO on the island of Ireland. In 2004 I took part in the historic first Terra Madre conference organised by Slow Food International in Turin, Italy, which brought together 5,000 farmers and food producers from 130 countries to co-ordinate their strategies for sustainable food production and the protection of GMO-free agricultural and gastronomic diversity.

The GM-free Ireland Network made international news on Earth Day 2005 by declaring 1,000 GMO-free zones on the island of Ireland. In 2006 we stopped the world's largest chemicals company BASF from releasing 450,000 GMO potatoes in Ireland, and held the Green Ireland Conference with leading GM-free campaigners from around the world including the Monsanto-contaminated farmer Percy Schmeiser from Canada, The Future of Food film director Deborah Koons Garcia from the USA, Benedikt Haerlin (former German MEP, Convener of the annual GMO-free Europe Conference, and Director of Save our Seeds and the Foundation on Future Farming), and Dr. Vandana Shiva (Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology) from India. In 2007 a Greenpeace / GM-free Ireland investigation discovered a ship carrying illegal GM animal feed from the USA entering the EU through Ireland, triggering an EU-transatlantic shutdown of untested feed imports. In 2008 I participated in a discussion with the European Commission on Participatory Science and Scientific Participation, and produced We cannot force feed EU citizens with GM food, a ground-breaking video interview with the former chairman of the European Food Safety Authority, Prof. Patrick Wall. In 2009 I gave a presentation on Designating Ireland as a GMO-free Biosafety Reserve for Europe at Food & Democracy - the 5th European Conference on GMO-free Regions in Lucerne, Switzerland. The GM-free Ireland campaign took longer than expected until 2009 when the Irish government finally agreed to (a) ban field trials and cultivation of all genetically modified (GM) crops in the Republic and (b) to introduce a voluntary GM-free label for quality food including meat, eggs, poultry, fish and dairy produce made without the use of GM animal feed (see related press conference video, press release and briefing). Unfortunately, the highly incompetent Irish Government has still not implemented this policy with any legislation).

In 2010 I returned to Geneva to resume full-time work on the Global Vision project. My long-term artistic goal remains the Global Vision movie. I am currently in production or development of the various related projects listed below.

I think of myself an information artist – working with information itself as my primary medium. My principal interest is to catalyse and create contexts of information or situations which evoke what the late anthropologist Gregory Bateson called The Pattern That Connects global issues to each other and to our own way of seeing them. Philosophy

Websites

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Global Vision: www.global-vision.org

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GM-free Ireland: www.gmfreeireland.org

Projects in production 2012 (see homepage for details)

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Interview with the Dalai Lama. Documentary film now in post-production, for release in 2012.

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Be The Change! Documentary film now in post-production.

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Worldview 2002. Documentary film ready for post-production.

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Ireland: a GMO-free biosafety reserve for Europe: www.gmfreeireland.org/reserve/

Projects in development 2012 (see homepage for details)

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International centre of learning, culture and communication for a sustainable future. Currently finalising architecture and business plan.

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Sustainability: The Best Investment. A 54-minute documentary film about the need for a major shift in investment to implement global solutions; and the Sustainability Student Action Kit, an educational multimedia package including thirteen 12-minute films, a DVD, a book and online resources designed as a prototype shared curriculum on solutions to world problems, aimed at the global teenager. Supported by UNDP, UNEP, UNICEF, UNESCO, UNFPA and WHO.

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Population Explosion. An electronic time-sculpture compressing 500 years of population growth into one minute of clock time.

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Sustainable City. A GIS computer simulation software application for any town or city to see itself – and its surrounding environment – as a whole system.

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Image Resonance. A revolutionary music-driven film- and video-editing software application designed for the Global Vision feature film (see below).

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Global Vision. An impressionistic documentary feature film conceived as a Collective Self-Portrait of Humankind and the Biosphere, a concept without precedent in art- or motion-picture history.

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Science and the Sacred. A trans-disciplinary learning programme designed to integrate the views of biology, neuroscience, consciousness research and spiritual traditions, to foster intellectual pluralism and the emergent global vision of the identity of Humankind, our perception of each other, and our place in the universe.

Texts

Most of these texts by Michael O'Callaghan can be downloaded here:

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Global Vision: Cognitive Process in Self-Organising Systems. Described by Development Policy Analyst Hazel Henderson as "one of the most succinct descriptions of the theoretical underpinnings of the societal transformation of human cultures now underway". New York, 1981.

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The Pattern that Connects. Introduction to the participatory planning manual for the proposed Global Vision feature film conceived as a collective self-portrait of Humankind and the biosphere. New York, 1982.

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When the Dream Becomes Real: The Inner Apocalypse in Mythology, Madness, and the Future. A transpersonal study of the symbolic and transformative function of apocalyptic imagery in the individual psyche and the collective unconscious. New York, 1981. (Available here for download soon.)

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A conversation with the psychiatrist Dr. John Weir Perry. San Francisco, 1982. (This is an excerpt from Michael's book When the Dream Becomes Real: The Inner Apocalypse in Mythology, Madness, and the Future described above.)

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Global Strategy: promoting the concept of a sustainable civilisation as a global goal. NGO position paper for the the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, New York, 1994.

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Sustainability: positioning the concept as a global goal. NGO position paper for the UNESCO conference on Environment & Society: Education and Public Awareness for Sustainability, Thessaloniki, Greece, 1997.

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Designating Ireland as a GMO-free Biosafety Reserve for Europe. PowerPoint presentation for Food & Democracy - the 5th European Conference on GMO-free Regions, Lucerne, Switzerland, April 2009.

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GM-free production: a unique selling point for Ireland - the food island. 47-page briefing with GM-free market survey, GM-free Ireland Network, 17 November 2009, Dublin.

Filmography

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I produced and directed over 85 video interviews and clips of leading thinkers, including two Nobel Peace laureates – H.H. the Dalai Lama and Rigoberta Menchú Tum – Buckminster Fuller, Bernardo Bertolucci, Richard E. Leakey, R.D. Laing, Thomas Berry, Hazel Henderson, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Kenneth Boulding, Robert Müller, Colin Campbell, Werner Zittel, Medard Gabel, in addition to the Rio +10 series listed below.

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The Rio+10 Interviews. I produced and directed these interviews of civil society leaders at the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2002, including John Bradin (Progressive Asset Management), Barry Coates (World Development Movement), Felix Dodds (Stakeholder Forum For Our Common Future), Bernward Geier (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements), Jane Goodall (Jane Goodall Institute), Mark Halle (International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development), Randall Hayes (Rainforest Action Network), Jonathan Lash (World Resources Institute), Claude Martin (WWF International), Dr. Wally n'Dow (Habitat II), Helena Norberg-Hodge (International Forum on Globalisation), Rémi Parmentier (Greenpeace International), Danny Schechter (Mediachannel.org), Achim Steiner (IUCN), Kaarin Taipale (ICLEI), Mathis Wackernagel (Redefining Progress), Dr. Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker (Wuppertal Institute), and David Woolcombe (Peace Child International).

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Fire on the Mountain. I was Co-Executive Producer (with Sheldon Rochlin) of this documentary film directed by the award-winning cinematographer David Cherniack, about the connection between consciousness and nature, filmed at the Karma Ling Institute in the French Alps in 1993 during a private gathering between the Dalai Lama, shamans and wisdom-keepers from the spiritual traditions of indigenous peoples from five continents, and high-level representatives of the world's organised religions. Distributed by Mystic Fire Video.

Conferences and events

I produced the first Internet Café at the United Nations in New York in 1995. In 1995 and '96 I was a member of the United Nations Department of Public Information NGO Conference Planning Committee, whose annual conferences brought 1,500 NGO delegates from around the world to the UN for strategic discussions on global issues. I have given lectures, talks, presentations, screenings and/or installations of my work at the United Nations headquarters in New York; the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) conferences; the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) in Istanbul; the World Business Forum on Enterprise, the City, and Sustainable Development (also in Istanbul); the International Conference on Environment & Society: Education and Public Awareness for Sustainability (organised by UNESCO and the Government of Greece at Thessaloniki in 1977); the Convergence 2001 festival in Dublin; the Second World Youth Congress in Morocco in 2003; the Green Ireland Conference in 2006; the Food and Democracy Conference in Switzerland in 2009; UNICEF; the World Health Organisation (WHO); Harvard University Cronkite Graduate Centre; Columbia University Graduate School of Business; Georgetown University; the University of Massachusetts; the University of South Florida; Friends' World College; the New School for Social Research; the UN International School; World Game Institute; Trinity College Dublin; the EU Committee of the Regions; and on various TV networks in Europe and North America.

Adviser and consultant

I served as an adviser and/or consultant for numerous clients including among others the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the International Court of the Environment Foundation (ICEF), the Sustainable Development Initiative at Columbia University Graduate School of Business, Peace Child International, the United Religions Initiative, Sustainable Ireland, Slow Food Ireland, the Irish Government Department of Agriculture and Food, and the European Network of GMO-free Regions.

Astroarchaeology

I would like to set up an International Institute of Astroarchaeology in Ireland, to foster a trans-disciplinary approach to the investigation and conservation of the astronomical design features of Ireland's ancient megalithic artworks. Built by pre-Indoeuropean stone age indigenous people as far back as 4,800 BCE, these proto-scientific instruments seem to have first enabled humans to observe and synchronise the sun and moon cycles, with revolutionary implications for accepted notions about the origins of the scientific method. Having survived millennia, the monuments are now being damaged during renovation work by archaeologists who deny or downplay their astronomical design.

Other

I used to be a painter, wrote some poetry early on, and play some traditional Irish music on the tin whistle. A citizen of Ireland, I speak English, French, German, Italian and some Spanish.

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URL of this page: www.global-vision.org/about/moc.php • updated 8 January 2012