Tom Van Sant loved birds. He raised pheasants as a child, kept pigeons, and once shared a studio with an owl family. A keen observer of avian form, he made studio sculptures of birds and featured them in public works throughout his career.

Although bird imagery also appeared on some of his kites of the 1970s, it is the kites themselves that best indicate Van Sant’s fascinations. Making the “sky sculptures” satisfied his passion for science and engineering but flying them let Van Sant respond to the tug and sway of air currents. Holding the string of a kite provides a communication with nature that may well be the most bird-like experience it is possible to have with two-feet on the ground.

Van Sant’s passion for the birds-eye-view ran through his work like a kite line, but the GeoSphere Project’s satellite collage of a cloud-free Earth provided more than a view of the planet from space akin to Earthrise (1968) or The Blue Marble (1972). While the earlier photographs inspired awe, love, and concern for Earth’s systems, the GeoSphere Project instrumentalized its image to move users between a cosmic bird’s-eye-view and conditions on the ground.

Van Sant admired R. Buckminster Fuller, who coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth,” but he didn’t always agree with the architect.“We're not passengers, really, on Spaceship Earth,” he said in 2008. “We're the upholstery.” With this idea, the artist combined seemingly contrary worldviews. In one, humans stand above nature and use it at will. In the other, humans who are embedded in a community of life, approach it with a sense of kinship. By moving users between a high-altitude Earth view and the texture of her fabric, the GeoSphere Project can be seen as an effort to stimulate the perception Van Sant named “whole-Earth awareness.”