An immersive journey through time and space.

Cosmic•Atomic synchronizes the short film Powers of Ten with its ancestors/descendants, placing the viewer inside a kaleidoscopic 360-degree ring of mirrored ascent/descent. The journey begins in the Netherlands with Kees Boeke’s Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, a 1957 book that explores outer space and our inner selves through orders of magnitude. It then takes us, in turn, to Miami for Charles and Ray Eames’s 1968 “rough draft” film adaptation of Boeke’s book, to Montreal the same year for the National Film Board’s Cosmic Zoom version, to Chicago in 1977 for Powers of Ten, the Eames team’s final draft commissioned by IBM, to Venice in 1996 for the IMAX remake Cosmic Voyage, and finally to the Googleplex for the 2012 Cosmic Eye smartphone app. Charles Eames is said to have hoped that Powers of Ten would give ten-year-olds an “intuition” of the dimensions of scale, sweeping them up in an interstellar zoom of ever-increasing speed and expanding perspective before plunging them back down to a single proton. Cosmic•Atomic compresses the sixty years of scientific imagination that preceded/followed Eames’s vision and invites you to feel them all at once.