Ex-centric Cinema: Machinic Vision in the Powers of Ten and Electronic Cartography

Abstract

After a century of cinema, accounts of this cultural form see it as divided between documentation and animation (the real and the magical). Yet the challenge that cinema presented in terms of a relocation of perception from the eye to the machine has become occluded. The shock of cinema in its earliest manifestations resided in the body of the spectator, no longer the site of primary perception, but dependent on an other (the camera, the projector) lacking in human qualities. This article argues that the newly configured body–machine relationship provided by cinema became a marginalized feature of cinematic culture, an ex-centric cinema relegated to the sub-fields of science and educational film. In the mid-20th century the project surfaces spectacularly in the work of pioneering designers Charles and Ray Eames, most poignantly in their film Powers of Ten (first made in 1968, remade in 1977) , a journey into the cosmos and back again into the body of a man. Bringing together discourses of space travel, cartography, physics and cinema, the film moves us towards an understanding of visual culture as an apparatus of calculated possibilities, where visualization replaces representation. If we take the Powers of Ten as a non-representational film, an ex-centric cinematic practice, we uncover non-linear and non-representational ways of apprehending the relationship between bodies and matter. This literal line of flight is one path that cinema may have taken. Its presence, however, is detectable outside of the cinema, in the software programs of electronic cartography copyrighted as Google Earth. The human body is not made virtual by its engagement with calculated visualization but is in turn part of the field of enquiry, equally porous, and definable in various scales and in different dimensions.

Cosmic Zoom, Powers of Ten and the Contested Politics of Sense

“…Whilst this assisted in creating the illusion of frictionless travel, it also served to occlude an important sense of conflict, inaccessibility and resistance which prevents full disclosure of reality between its various scales, and which is nevertheless present in the natural world. As Janet Harbord (2012) has noted with reference to Powers of Ten , shortly following the penetration of the skin, microscopic photography gives way to a series of carefully disguised, diagrammatic constructions. She suggests that the images of collagen, capillary, nucleus, atom and quark, though based on slides derived from electron microscopy, were enhanced through painting in order to create forms that might be more readily recognised (p. 108).…”

Scalar Travel Documentaries: Animating the Limits of the Body and Life

“…The short documentary film Powers of Ten was written and directed by the architects, designers, and filmmakers Charles and Ray Eames for IBM (Harbord, 2012;Morrison et al, 1982). This exploration of 42 powers of ten is an expanded version of an earlier sketch made in 1968.…”