Hardback : £57.45
The Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames announces itself as "A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe," and in it, we see two people enjoying a picnic on a sunny day before the view zooms up and away to show the park where they sit, the city around the park, the continent, the whole globe, and progressively farther into space, lightyears beyond the initial scene. It then moves back in for a close-up of the hand of the picnicker, travelling deep into the microscopic realm. Zachary Horton calls this effect the "cosmic zoom," a trope that has influenced countless media forms over the past seventy years.
The Cosmic Zoom uses this visual and conceptual flight through the scales of the universe as a starting point to develop a cross-disciplinary theory of scale as mediated difference. It considers the origins of our notions of scale, how scalar mediation functions differently in analog and digital modes, and how cosmic zoom media has influenced both scientific and popular understandings of the seen and unseen world. These considerations, Horton shows, are vital to addressing the major questions of both climate change and big data, which he treats as two facets of a single issue: scalar mediation. Through analyses of literature, film, digital media, and database history, Horton brings our obsession with scale into sharper focus, establishing a much-needed framework for thinking about scale across multiple domains and disciplines.
The Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames announces itself as "A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe," and in it, we see two people enjoying a picnic on a sunny day before the view zooms up and away to show the park where they sit, the city around the park, the continent, the whole globe, and progressively farther into space, lightyears beyond the initial scene. It then moves back in for a close-up of the hand of the picnicker, travelling deep into the microscopic realm. Zachary Horton calls this effect the "cosmic zoom," a trope that has influenced countless media forms over the past seventy years.
The Cosmic Zoom uses this visual and conceptual flight through the scales of the universe as a starting point to develop a cross-disciplinary theory of scale as mediated difference. It considers the origins of our notions of scale, how scalar mediation functions differently in analog and digital modes, and how cosmic zoom media has influenced both scientific and popular understandings of the seen and unseen world. These considerations, Horton shows, are vital to addressing the major questions of both climate change and big data, which he treats as two facets of a single issue: scalar mediation. Through analyses of literature, film, digital media, and database history, Horton brings our obsession with scale into sharper focus, establishing a much-needed framework for thinking about scale across multiple domains and disciplines.
1 Scale Theory
2 Surfaces of Mediation: Cosmic View as Drama of
Resolution
3 An Analog Universe: Mediating Scalar
Temporality in the Eameses’ Toy Films
4 Shaping Scale: Powers of Ten and the Politics
of Trans-Scalar Constellation
5 Scale and Difference: Toward a New Ecology
6 A Digital Universe? Database, Scale, and
Recursive Identity
Coda Dwelling in the Scalar Spectrum
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Zachary Horton is assistant professor of English and media
studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a game designer,
filmmaker, camera designer, and the founding director of the
Vibrant Media Lab.
"The upshot of this granular media history is an urgent theoretical
insight into how humans have handled differences in scale and how
they might do so differently, urgent because the mishandling of the
question threatens to impose an early end to our existence and that
of many other species. The books, films, and digital media that
Horton studies are a powerful scaffolding for this argument, but
the real material he wants us to consider are the theoretical
armatures themselves, the ones that our various media and our
accommodations in the world are built on."
*The Brooklyn Rail*
“Scales are musical things to practice, metric things to weigh
with, ladders to ascend the heavens, and climaxes of our stories.
Horton shows that scale is a matter of shape as much as size, of
quality as much as quantity in this cosmic journey through postwar
cultural forms that comment on the human, and more-than-human,
condition. There are seismic implications here, for not only media
studies, but any discipline, or reader, in need of a philosophy of
scale.”
*John Durham Peters, Yale University*
“In this illuminating and well-researched book, Horton takes us on
a journey through different scales of the universe. Rather than
entice us with the prospect of a godlike glide across a cosmic
zipline, he exhorts us to take responsibility for scalar relations.
Through its variously enfolded media ecologies, The Cosmic Zoom
thus ends up performing an ethics of mediation for our troubled
world.”
*Joanna Zylinska, author of Nonhuman Photography*
“Down the rabbit hole, and up again, across mediated universes and
powers of ten, resolution to resolution, The Cosmic Zoom is an
outstanding scale-hopping piece of scholarship. Horton brings to
focus both why scales are crucial to how we understand disciplinary
knowledge and how scalar difference is a core part of the
transformational powers that define contemporary aesthetic and
epistemic cultures.”
*Jussi Parikka, author of Insect Media and A Geology of Media*
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