Geneva Metropolitan Area
I'm an artist, activist and filmmaker with 54 years of interest in the cognitive dimensions of the global meta-crisis (the tangle of catastrophic and existential risks that now threaten the end of democracy, human rights and civilisation in our lifetime). I see the meta-crisis as a cognitive, artistic challenge. I work to create contexts of information or "situations" that evoke the pattern that connects global problems / solutions to each other & to our ways of seeing them. I am currently in development on The Politics of Perception, a cinéma vérité documentary feature film to focus attention on the need to distinguish knowledge from opinion. My work has been funded and/or supported by UNICEF • WHO • UNDP • UNEP • UNESCO • UNDPI • UNFPA • UNCHS • UNHCHR • Club of Rome • MIT Systems Dynamics Group • WWF • IUCN • IISD • EEB • Earth Day International • Greenpeace Europe • Peace Child International • International Transpersonal Association • European Broadcasting Union • City Screen / Picturehouse Cinemas • Working Title (Developments) Ltd • GM Watch • EcoNexus • Friends of the Earth • World Game Institute • Irish Government • Harvard University Cronkite Graduate Centre • Princeton U. Woodrow Wilson School of International Studies • Columbia U. Sustainable Development Initiative • U. of British Columbia School of Community and Regional Planning • U. of Virginia School of Architecture • New School University • Schumacher College UK • Slow Food International • WETV • TV Trust for the Environment • Clifford Chance • Pricewaterhouse-Coopers • Apple Computer • Sun Microsystems • Caran d'Ache • Wilsdorf Foundation • Millbank, Tweed, Hadley & McLoy • J.M. Kaplan Fund • R. Buckminster Fuller • Seán Mac Bride • Aurelio Peccei • Maurice Strong • Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland • Achim Steiner • Marcello Palazzi • Richard Leakey • Jane Goodall • Vandana Shiva • Thomas Berry • Stan Grof • R.D. Laing • John Weir Perry • Joseph Campbell • Joan Halifax Roshi • Donnella Meadows • Kenneth Boulding • Hazel Henderson • Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker • Richard Falk • Rigoberta Menchú • Satish Kumar • the Dalai Lama • Bernardo Bertolucci • Peter Gabriel • Martin Scorsese. For more info please explore the links below.
Global Vision Foundation is an international public interest non-profit organisation founded by the Irish information-artist Michael O’Callaghan in Geneva in 2012, in collaboration with a transdisciplinary network of leading thinkers around the world. We are interested in the politics of perception and the emergent global civil society consensus for creative system change, because as Confucius said, "when people share a common goal, their natural tendency is to co-operate in realising it." This requires a whole systems, trans-disciplinary, artistic approach to global transformation. Fritjof Capra put it in a nutshell: “As our new century unfolds, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the major problems of our time —whether economic, environmental, technological, social or political— are systemic problems that cannot be solved within the current fragmented and reductionist framework of our academic disciplines and social institutions. We need a radical shift in our perceptions, thinking, and values.” We see the global crisis as a cognitive, cultural, artistic challenge. We want to catalyse the psycho-social process of world-view transformation, by creating trans-disciplinary contexts of information or situations that focus attention on the pattern that connects global problems and solutions to each other and to our own ways of seeing them and discussing them. This "outside the box" information-art strategy is informed by 50 years of engagement with a trans-disciplinary network of Nobel laureates, UN agencies, NGOs, universities, institutes, scientists, leading thinkers and artists around the world. Target audiences include students, policy makers and leaders from the private sector, governments, international agencies and global civil society. The Foundation's activities are independently audited, and are supervised by the government of Switzerland.
Michael helped to organise the Rhone Economic Forum 2015 (Forum Economique Rhodanien) - a network of economic and political stakeholders from the Rhone river basin in Switzerland and France who met in Maison de la Paix at the Graduate Institute Geneva to discuss the theme "Governance in all its forms". The conference was co-sponsored by Global Vision Foundation, the Swiss Confederation, the Embassy of France in Switzerland, the European Centre of Culture, the Swiss foreign policy think tank "foraus"), MEDEF Rhône-Alpes, the French-Swiss Chamber of Commerce, and various banks etc. Michael was a member of the organising committee along with the President of Global Vision Foundation, Prof Charles Méla and various members of the Forum Economique. The conference was opened by the former President of the State Council of Geneva Dominique Föllmi, and included presentations by the former French Minister of Culture Luc Ferry; Michael O'Callaghan; Prof. Charles Méla; and two members of Global Vision's board of advisers: Guillaume Chenevière (President of the Media and Society Foundation), and Nora Bateson (President of the International Bateson Institute), who gave a keynote speech on the role of perception in governance, followed by a screening of her film An Ecology of Mind.
The GM-free Ireland Network was an association of individuals and organisations collaborating to keep the island of Ireland off-limits to the environmental release of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) including viruses, algae, bacteria, seeds, crops, trees, insects, molluscs, crustaceans, fish, poultry and livestock. The network's website at www.gmfreeireland.org is no longer active, but we continue to post regularly on Facebook with the hashtag #GMfreeIreland
Global Vision Corporation, an NGO accredited to the UN Commisison on Sustainable Development and then to ECOSOC, was the vehicle I used for my work from 1982 - 2003. Our trans-diciplinary board of advisers included Richard A. Falk, R. Buckminster Fuller, Medard Gabel, Prof. Herbert Girardet, Danny Goldberg, Dr. Stanislav Grof, M.D, Joan Halifax Roshi, Hazel Henderson, Prof. John Kallos, R.D. Laing, Pamela Lippe, Seán Mac Bride, William A. McDonough, Marcello Palazzi, Janice E. Perlman, Dr. John Weir Perry, Prof. William E. Rees, Danny Schechter, Robert A. Smith III, Prof. Robert A. Thurman, Eric Utne, and David. A. Woolcombe. GVC carried out extensive research on worldview formation and transformation, and wrote the related participatory planning manual for an impressionistic feature film conceived as a "Collective Self-Portrait of Humankind and the Biosphere" — a concept without precedent in art or motion-picture history. We also produced video interviews with leading thinkers talking about global issues, participated in numerous related international conferences, published conference papers, developed software and media projects, and helped organise the annual UNDPI-NGO conferences in 1995 and 1996 involving the participation of 1,500 NGO representatives from global civil society. For more info see "Publications" and "Interests" below.
I was a member of this IUCN commission at the UNESCO conference on Environment and Society: Education and Public Awareness for Sustainability at Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1997. See the Declaration of Thessaloniki: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0011/001177/117772eo.pdf My UNESCO conference paper "Sustainability: positioning the concept as a global goal": http://www.global-vision.org/papers/SustainabilityPositioning.pdf