Ray and Charles Eames - Powers of Ten, 1977
Influenced by Kees Boeke's - Cosmic View: the universe in 40 jumps, 1957
Analysed by Mark Dorrain 'Adventure on the Vertical', Cabinet Magazine, Issue 44, 2012
'Beyond its ostensibly educational function, the film does two somewhat contrasting things. Firstly, insofar as it is a dream sequence - a monstrous sleep of reason or perhaps even a 4 dimensional nightmare -it pictures a kind of vertiginous, abyssal collapse of the everyday reality with which the film begins....On the other hand, when we see it within the Cold War corporate and national context in which it was conceived and developed, Powers of Ten with its visual rhetoric of voyaging through scales, across outer and inner space, aimed ultimately at the core of the atom - might also be read in terms of the domination and control of the realms that it pictures....Here we can experience why it is important that we first go outward.'
Reminds me of Ilya Kabakov, the man who flew into space from his apartment, 1985
The hero with cosmic visions is restricted to the power of fantasy. Only sometimes does the wish to escape allow us break through even the most concrete of confinements. The beauty of the escape is soon dampened when one realises that if the hero lives within a totalitarian stricture then his mind's fantasy will only ever be prescribed by what has been shown. The Utopian limbo that the hero travels to is only a montage of what he has been shown to him in movies/books/television. Therefore the hero's vision of utopia is a controlled and controllable escape space.The freedom is a facade as the fantasy is always transient and uninhabitable. The hero will always fall. No matter how far in or out we go we are still consumed by a powerful other, in some shape or form.
Influenced by Kees Boeke's - Cosmic View: the universe in 40 jumps, 1957
Analysed by Mark Dorrain 'Adventure on the Vertical', Cabinet Magazine, Issue 44, 2012
'Beyond its ostensibly educational function, the film does two somewhat contrasting things. Firstly, insofar as it is a dream sequence - a monstrous sleep of reason or perhaps even a 4 dimensional nightmare -it pictures a kind of vertiginous, abyssal collapse of the everyday reality with which the film begins....On the other hand, when we see it within the Cold War corporate and national context in which it was conceived and developed, Powers of Ten with its visual rhetoric of voyaging through scales, across outer and inner space, aimed ultimately at the core of the atom - might also be read in terms of the domination and control of the realms that it pictures....Here we can experience why it is important that we first go outward.'
Reminds me of Ilya Kabakov, the man who flew into space from his apartment, 1985
The hero with cosmic visions is restricted to the power of fantasy. Only sometimes does the wish to escape allow us break through even the most concrete of confinements. The beauty of the escape is soon dampened when one realises that if the hero lives within a totalitarian stricture then his mind's fantasy will only ever be prescribed by what has been shown. The Utopian limbo that the hero travels to is only a montage of what he has been shown to him in movies/books/television. Therefore the hero's vision of utopia is a controlled and controllable escape space.The freedom is a facade as the fantasy is always transient and uninhabitable. The hero will always fall. No matter how far in or out we go we are still consumed by a powerful other, in some shape or form.
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