Cosmic•Atomic

I made Cosmic•Atomic as an artistic response to the startling rise of anti-intellectual or “post-truth” populism in the United States and around the world. In the face of widespread climate change denial and vaccine conspiracy theories, I wanted to find a new way to defend the scientific method against the kinds of cynical disinformation campaigns so successfully peddled on social and traditional media by opportunistic grifters, corporations, and politicians. Clearly, when it comes to winning the “war on science,” it isn’t enough to simply have the facts on your side; most of us make meaning through stories. So, I started with my own.

My dad was a minister with a PhD in theology. He loved God and respected science and raised me to value both religion and education. These two strands came together while I was attending a Christian men’s conference during a break from graduate school. Sitting in a dark arena, surrounded by thousands of people, I encountered Powers of Ten for the first time. With our eyes all looking up at the same glowing screen, the film pulled us out into the stupendously large and then back down towards the infinitely small. Along the way, my mind boggled as the vast expanse of outer space mirrored the incomprehensible depth of our innermost selves. As a Christian, it was deeply thrilling and profoundly humbling, stretching the capacity of my mind and spilling over into awe, wonder, and reverence. But when one of the speaker’s came on stage and praised the film’s majestic enormity and exquisite detail as evidence of intelligent design, the scholar in me bristled at how a film based on empirical data could be so easily converted into a propaganda tool for creationist pseudoscience.

Like my father before me, I am now a professor. Only my field is communication and, as such, I’m painfully aware of how the academy often resists translating our theoretical and technical lexicons into more accessible and compelling stories capable of reaching and persuading broader audiences. All too often, our expertise circulates only amongst ourselves, keeping valuable knowledge wonky and obscure. For instance, while studies have repeatedly shown that around 97% of climate scientists agree that human behavior is driving climate change, the Pew Research Center recently found that only 27% of Americans are aware of this overwhelming consensus. This ignorance is exacerbated by counterfactual “controversies” manufactured by the fossil fuel industry to confuse the public and stymie any policy reforms that could hurt their bottom line. It’s also the product of a sustained (and largely successful) effort to fuse conservative faith and politics: if God is in control of a world that is intelligently designed, then the environment is self-correcting regardless of human behavior. Of course, climate scientists would beg to differ, but their increasingly urgent messages are still having trouble getting through. Which is why we need more artists telling science stories that compel and persuade audiences through creativity, meaning, and emotion. And the stakes are only getting higher.

Alarmed by anti-science sentiment, I made Cosmic•Atomic as a nostalgic love letter to the past in pursuit of a more #OpenScience future. I wanted the experience to remind people of what it felt like to see themselves and their place in the Universe for the very first time, whether in a library, a classroom, or an IMAX theater. Cosmic•Atomic is a living archive of our collective history of inquiry and exploration, an accessible demonstration of the iterative nature of knowledge creation, and a call for more personal and subjective defenses of the scientific method. It syncs together Powers of Ten’s sources and imitators, collapses their chronology, and juxtaposes their soundtracks to create an immersive and emotional experience of scientific storytelling that uses emerging technology to reboot those initial thrills of discovery. In these turbulent times, as we enter the Webb Space Telescope era, I hope, beyond hope, that Cosmic•Atomic can help inspire new ways of looking up at the sky and down to earth.