Powers of Ten

Course subject(s) 4. Unraveling Complexity

A final example is the video Powers of Ten directed by Charles and Ray Eames. Remember, our Pinterest Gallery 3 is in honor of Ray Eames.

The complexity of the story was made clear by a strict format for the film. The zooming in and out, in a specific timing and by powers of ten, is the concept of the film and the method to make the complexity of different sizes very clear.

Powers of Ten™ (1977)

“Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward -into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell. POWERS OF TEN © 1977 EAMES OFFICE LLC (Available at www.eamesoffice.com)”

Creative Commons License
Image|Ability - Visualising the unimaginable by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/image-ability-visualizing-unimaginable/.
Back to top