As I continued my reflection upon my artistic influences I was reminded of this unusual and influential film.
“Powers of ten and the relative size of things in the universe” is a film by Charles and Ray Eames from 1977 that may technically seem a little dated now, but always appealed to me and certainly appears to connect with all the other influences on the development of my work. Again it is the downward view, opening right out to the universe in one direction, and closing in to sub atomic particles in the other – the macrocosm and the microcosm. The film is nine minutes long but I hope you can find time to view it in full.
They were a husband and wife team (which one was Charles and which one was Ray?!) and two of the most influential American designers of the 20th century, across an inconceivably wide range of design disciplines.
“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 a s 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.”