About the Foundation

A living intellectual practice considering the Earth, the sky, cities, cultures, and technology are not backgrounds to human life. They are active living systems within systems. Today echoing the cultural critiquesof theorists like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Frederic Jameson, “Digital reality has become a ‘third nature’ built on top of the physical world, making original nature almost invisible". At this cultural turning point, digital dominance is overshadowing creativity. Reggio’s films make these systems visible by adjusting speed,stretching time, and holding the camera long enough that the ordinary becomes extraordinary: a freewaybecomes a river of light, a crowd becomes a tide, a machine becomes a kind of weather. This is not manipulation, it is revelation.

With revelation to facilitate change, we can re-imagine.

A central tension in Reggio’s work is the paradox of holding conflicting thoughts of this and that, in evidence in his deliberate use of the very technology he critiques. We built technology to serve us and make life easy, butover time we begin to serve it. Yet it is in the hard parts of existence — the physical effort, the messy debates, in the shared weight of a problem that we find true community.

By utilizing the technological mediums to break the trance of modern living, the Foundation aims to focus technology away from utility and back toward shared humanity. Moving past just the arts and suffering, we are organizing new formats and projects. Guided by our mentors and advisors—including Kimi Ginoza Green (Focus), Gordon Lee Fuller (Planetary Arts), Steven Guerin (Logistics), Ben Shedd (Dome platforms), and Andrew Sterman (Philip Glass Ensemble sound design)—we are developing the organizational and financial presentation required to support an enlarged budget that reflects the true gravitas of our collaborating artists.