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.

Jack­son Pol­lock paint­ed with the kind of vis­cer­al imme­di­a­cy that frees you from hav­ing to know much about his ideas, his meth­ods, or his life. But spend enough time gaz­ing at his can­vas­es and you’ll sure­ly start to get curi­ous. If you’ve seen Melvyn Bragg talk to Fran­cis Bacon in stu­dio, gallery, café, and bar on the South Bank Show’s pro­file of the painter, you know how expert­ly he can open up an artist’s world. Two years after that Inter­na­tion­al Emmy-win­ning pro­gram, the broad­cast­er, writer, and House of Lords Mem­ber applied his tal­ents to a per­haps even less under­stood painter in Por­trait of an Artist: Jack­son Pol­lock. Where Bragg appeared as a par­tic­i­pa­to­ry pres­ence in The South Bank Show — to the extent, at one drink-sod­den point, of get­ting tip­sy him­self — here he sticks to nar­ra­tion. His rel­e­ga­tion to the sound­track per­haps reflects a cer­tain cul­tur­al dis­tance: to an Amer­i­can, Bragg seems about as Eng­lish a host as they come, and to the rest of the world, Pol­lock seems about as Amer­i­can a painter as they come — in his work as well as his life.

The Library Media Project describes Pol­lock as a “ ‘cow­boy’ from Wyoming” instru­men­tal in forg­ing the Amer­i­can art move­ment, Abstract Expres­sion­ism. They describe his life in the small­est nut­shell: “His famous ‘drip’ paint­ings earned him both noto­ri­ety and abuse and the pres­sures of new-found celebri­ty com­pound­ed his life­long strug­gle with alco­holism, a fight he lost when he died in a car crash at the age of 44,” In its 50 Bragg-nar­rat­ed min­utes, Por­trait of an Artist: Jack­son Pol­lock goes into far greater detail, using exist­ing radio con­ver­sa­tions with Pol­lock, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Hans Namuth’s film of Pol­lock at work, and inter­views with crit­ics, cura­tors, Pol­lock­’s col­leagues, his friends, his wid­ow, and his mis­tress. Where a biopic like Ed Har­ris’ Pol­lock plunges straight into the artist’s brash con­duct and volatile mix­ture of work and life, this doc­u­men­tary steps slight­ly back, exam­in­ing Pol­lock­’s paint­ings and the Hem­ing­wayesque exis­tence that gave rise to them in a cool­er — not to say more Eng­lish — light. Make them a dou­ble fea­ture, if you can.

Por­trait of an Artist: Jack­son Pol­lock will be added to the Doc­u­men­tary sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jack­son Pol­lock: Lights, Cam­era, Paint! (1951)

MoMA Puts Pol­lock, Rothko & de Koon­ing on Your iPad

Fran­cis Bacon on the South Bank Show: A Sin­gu­lar Pro­file of the Sin­gu­lar Painter

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.

No one will ever accuse Jason Sil­va of lack­ing in enthu­si­asm. The self-pro­fessed “film­mak­er, futur­ist, epiphany addict” is in love, head over heels, with tech­nol­o­gy, and it’s a love infec­tious, as he shows us above in his short mono­logue, Atten­tion: The Immer­sive Pow­er of Cin­e­ma. Inspired by Diana Slattery’s essay “Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty and Hal­lu­ci­na­tion,” Sil­va extracts a the­o­ry of cin­e­ma as a “rhetor­i­cal tech­nol­o­gy, a shrine to immer­sion.” His ideas are also built around a nar­ra­tive and lin­guis­tic con­cept known as “deic­tic shift the­o­ry,” from deix­is or “self-ori­en­ta­tion.” For Sil­va, the deic­tic shift occurs when the “view­er assumes a view­point in the sto­ry,” and, in total immer­sion, “enters the dream as dream.” He spec­u­lates that at this point, the “pre-frontal lobe dims, and there’s a loss of ego,” such that “cin­e­ma is akin to god­li­ness.” Hog­wash, you say? Per­haps, but it’s enter­tain­ing hog­wash, and if one takes the time to process the ideas embed­ded in Silva’s man­ic, form-is-con­tent pre­sen­ta­tion, it’s even per­sua­sive. But poor Beethoven. Fur Elise doesn’t deserve anoth­er beat­ing.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.