Cosmic•Atomic

An immersive trip across time and space.

Cosmic•Atomic synchronizes the short film Powers of Ten with its ancestors/descendants, placing the viewer within a 360 degree kaleidoscopic ring of mirrored ascent/descent. The journey begins in the Netherlands with Kees Boeke's Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, a 1957 book exploring outer space and our inner selves through orders of magnitude. It then takes us, in turn, to Miami for Charles and Ray Eames' 1968 "rough sketch" film adaption of Boeke's book, to Montreal in that same year for the National Film Board's Cosmic Zoom version, to Chicago in 1977 for Powers of Ten, the Eames team's final draft commissioned by IBM, to Venice in 1996 for the IMAX remake Cosmic Voyage, to the Googleplex for the 2012 Cosmic Eye smartphone app, and, finally, to the Adler Planetarium for the European Southern Observatory's 2016 "Blueprints of the Universe." It's been said that Charles Eames hoped Powers of Ten would give ten-year-olds a “gut feeling” of the dimensions of scale by taking them on an interstellar zoom of ever-increasing speed and expanding perspective before plummeting them all the way back down to a single proton. Cosmic•Atomic compresses the sixty years of scientific imagination that preceded/followed Eames’ vision and invites you to feel them all at once.

NOTE: Cosmic•Atomic is best experienced on a headset while sitting in a swivel chair, but, if viewed on a computer, using arrows on a keyboard can also provide smooth rotation.