Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten: The Classic Film Re-Imagined By 40 Artists

Thinkers, cre­ators, and imag­in­ers of all kinds love Pow­ers of Ten, with good cause. If you’ve nev­er seen Charles and Ray Eames’ still-influ­en­tial film on all the var­i­ous scales at which one can view the uni­verse, take nine min­utes and watch it free online. Though the orig­i­nal pow­er cou­ple of mod­ern Amer­i­can design pro­duced the film 35 years ago, the short has stayed as crisp, strik­ing, and (lit­er­al­ly) per­spec­tive-alter­ing as ever. We may not need a new Pow­ers of Ten, per se, but who would­n’t be inter­est­ed in see­ing how many 21st-cen­tu­ry inter­pre­ta­tions of its theme 40 artists can come up with? The Pow­ers Project has tak­en on this very idea, invit­ing con­trib­u­tors from Los Ange­les to Köln to Welling­ton to Kyoto to re-envi­sion each of the dis­tances from which the orig­i­nal film views human­i­ty, from one meter away to 10²⁴ meters away to .000001 angstroms away.

Just above, you can watch one com­plet­ed seg­ment of the Pow­ers Project from Lon­don’s Jor­di Pagès. In it, the cam­era moves toward the sur­face of a hand and into the skin, even­tu­al­ly find­ing its way into a sin­gle blood ves­sel. When it even­tu­al­ly comes avail­able online, the fin­ished project will include almost as many styles of film­mak­ing as it does scales of view­ing. Open to as many tech­niques of and per­spec­tives on mov­ing image cre­ation as its con­trib­u­tors could sum­mon, the film will take the Eames’ idea, orig­i­nal­ly all about the straight-on per­cep­tion of real­i­ty, into a new realm of abstrac­tion. Who’d have guessed how much rich artis­tic poten­tial remained in, as Pow­ers of Ten’s sub­ti­tle puts it, the Rel­a­tive Size of Things in the Uni­verse and the Effect of Adding Anoth­er Zero?

via Fast­CoDe­sign

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ice Cube & Charles Eames Rev­el in L.A. Archi­tec­ture

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.