This lonely scene, the galaxies like dust is what most of space looks like. This emptiness is normal.”

Shifting between poetic and technological commentary, the male voice-over in Powers of Ten sounds familiar, a friendly voice from a 20^th century educational. Calm, trustworthy and concentrated. One could never feel lonely “picture-travelling” in the cinematic company of such a voice. At the time when the Eameses, the American painter-architect couple Charles and Ray Eames, produced their film Powers of Ten¹, the Apollo program had accomplished its missions. People had seen the Blue Marble image that turned the earth into an object.

What makes this film so appealing today? I first came to think of it while spending some days offline in Mongolia – looking at the vast green terrain and the huge open sky, watching how a herd of horses moves in formation across the landscape, a movement which briefly appears as an invisible vector. The Mongolian outback would be an apt starting point for such a picture-travel. While the horizontal view was already stunning, moving vertically seemed tempting. Some years ago, this piece of land in Mongolia might as well have been on the moon. Power lines weren’t running out to the country. It felt like a déjà vu of a past century. At night, one could look straight up into the Milky Way.

A view from above would have been another step into de-familiarization with desktop work. Out there, no network distracts attention. Possibly Gravity, a film by Alfonso Cuarón (2013), which featured the grandiosity of space in IMAX format, resonated with this desire. With some considerably nostalgic undertone to the narrative – nostalgia for a universe as it used to be seen in films and magazines, nostalgia for the Blue Marble² when the picture was first released. Meanwhile, in some contexts today, the Blue Marble image appears so trivialized it becomes nearly invisible (think of NGO or company logos, for example). And in the end, Gravity wanted to convince its audience: humans are happiest on earth. After hovering in space during many lonely scenes and soliloquies, successfully avoiding being hit by space junk orbiting at an unfathomable speed, Dr. Ryan Stone, the main character starred by Sandra Bullock, finally finds a button in the capsule’s cockpit which enables her to return to the juicy green nature of planet earth, a spot in nature so intensely colored it seems unreal. She ascends from the water and rises up on the lush grass; small movements reminiscent of the human evolution played fast-forward. Dr. Stone finally reconciled with her personal past in the black void out there. Here, the universe appears like a space for sublimation. In another recent film, Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014), the main character and film’s namesake, Lucy, is dissolved, storing her enhanced knowledge onto a USB flash drive carpeted, thanks to some deliberately sloppy post production, with a flat desktop image of outer space – liquidation back and forth. Just as Hannah Arendt asserted in her essay on the conquest of space: finally, men can only meet themselves wherever they go. I will return to this conclusion later.

 

 

The Mongolian vastness evokes frontier questions without giving answers: the moon, primeval landscapes, new markets, go east, go west, the land of opportunity. Outer space was the new frontier of the 20th century. In this sense, Gravity looks back at an old new frontier, the universe as a military territory. Hollywood raved over the past in photographs of the first moon landing, Apollo mission or the Voyagers. At the time John F. Kennedy started a government program named New Frontier, the space age was to bring Americans “on par with the stars”. A few presidencies later, Jimmy Carter launched the Voyager spacecraft carrying a Golden Record including messages to extra-terrestrial unknown intelligent life forms.

These days, nobody really believes in life in outer space. But interestingly, Google, the worlds largest Internet company, seems to crave for cosmic symbolism: it recently purchased Howard Hughes’s old hangar to house it’s Youtube offices, and is running a competition called Moon 2.0 that aims to collect data in this territory and to make it accessible to geo-browsing (see also Google Moon, Google Mars and Google Sky).

 

In a warm and clear summer night on a balcony in Berlin, a friend said he saw the ISS passing over Berlin’s starry sky, and a few seconds later his brother, who was on the other end of the phone, saw its lights in the night sky above his Bavarian house. What a nice way to be connected, observing the same distant object passing by. Here, technology changes the matrix back into world, not the other way around.

 

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Back to Powers of Ten and our question, why might this short film be worth watching these days and what do films like Gravity tell us about this warm embrace of space. Does Powers of Ten serve as proof of the contemporary loss of the vertical, our ability for vertical orientation? The willingness to take a whole society – it was always a well-articulated ambition of the Eameses to reach a wide audience – up into space and back again? “The Eameses’ innovative technique did not simply present the audience with a new way of seeing things. Rather, it gave form to a new mode of perception that was already in everybody’s mind.” ³

Today, the vertical can only be found poorly represented in projects such as Google Earth – poorly represented, since when confronted through by way of a horizontal screen, with an endlessly scalable earth, verticality seems as lost as ever – whose inventors also claim that they were inspired by Powers of Ten;⁴ or in big commercial spectacles, e.g. when the Austrian extreme sportsman Felix Baumgartner fell from the stratosphere back to earth within seconds. The latter was not staged out of educational purposes for a wide public; rather, it meant to perform something nobody else would be capable of, something almost post-human or supernatural. The news headlines read “Felix Baumgartner has broken the record for highest-ever sky dive, and so became the first man to intentionally break the sound barrier after jumping from a capsule positioned in the stratosphere – nearly 39 kilometers in the air.” One could also conclude, somebody did something stupid. A year later, Google executive Alan Eustace beats Felix Baumgartner’s skydiving record. Even with 3d technologies, the question of depth is rendered into a question of convincing visual effects.

As Baumgartner’s head-cam reveals, the vertical drop proves to be a very stressful first person view, it lacks all the simulated mechanic elegance and calmness we find in Powers, also since the video is a one way free-fall back to this planet. The fall stands in contrast to the smooth and realistic motion through the footage in Powers⁵ , where aerial photographs and satellite footage were arranged frame by frame. “The only ‘live’ (film) sequence in Powers is the picnic scene, forming the first 30 seconds of the film. The most onerous part of the production was the remaining 40 images, drawn from aerial photography and images from space travel in collaboration with NASA. The film is patched together from photographs of photographs, photographs of composites of maps and drawings, photographs of paintings based on images from a microscope, to produce an imagined sequence rather than an indexical one.”⁶

According to Tom Holert Robert Smithson “emphasized how much aerial photography and air travel are responsible for landscapes being perceived more and more like maps, and – like cities – no longer obeying the conventions of the Euclidean or central-perspective tradition of seeing. The view of the earth from on board an airplane fictionalizes the topography, unsettles its verisimilitude and that of the (photographic) image of it. ‘The world seen from the air is abstract and illusive. From the window of an airplane one can see drastic changes of scale, as one ascends and descends.’”⁷

In a remake of Powers, entitled 2012: Images worth spreading: Cosmic Eye (iPad, iPhone, iPod) available on YouTube, a person called Louise (at least it is gendered versus the hetero-normative WASP couple of the Eameses) lies on the grass in Googleplex, Google’s company campus in Mountain View, the “camera” then zooms out, from the West Coast and all the way up to the Milky Way. This picture journey is traversed as if it were the screen of a tablet, a single gesture – zoom in, zoom out. It shows a computers’ point of view. Strangely this video is reminiscent of the narrow and totalitarian world as described in the science fiction novel The Circle by Dave Eggers, not least because it is about a campus similar to the Googleplex. There, Eggers imagines a dark world getting more and more restricted, while its main character experiences transparency as a form of illumination (among Circlers this process is labeled as second enlightenment).

What makes The Circle particularly strong is the realization that the reality we live in isn’t much different then the one envisioned in the book. The smooth and manipulative Circle-language emerges from quotes of business people in newspaper articles, like Lord Sugar’s son, Simon, chief executive of Amscreen, which developed the OptimEyes technology behind a British supermarket’s facial recognition screens. “Brands deserve to know not just an estimation of how many eyeballs are viewing their adverts, but who they are, too. Through our Face Detection technology, we want to optimise our advertisers’ campaigns, reduce wastage and in turn deliver the type of insight that only online has previously been able to achieve.”⁸

Besides the affinities towards all kinds of gadgets and technologies, there is the wish to step out of the collapsed and continuous present, which is like a default state of daily routines across the matrix (not across the world). All the more so as recent technological advances get a tighter grip on consumers. “I think it worries people because there’s something very permanent about it,” says Xiaoou Tang. “Even when you’re talking about using your face or your fingerprints to unlock a phone, this is a password we can never change. We only have one, and once it’s set up it’s going to be your password for life.”⁹

So including Google Earth, the whole Googleplex is claustrophobic, mind narrowing, as Dave Eggers intensely describes through his fictitious company The Circle (an amalgam of Google, Facebook and Twitter). Their key invention is called “TruYou”, a single integrated user interface that optimizes all Internet interaction. Their philosophy promotes total transparency, every recording becomes part of a collective record, and nothing can be deleted. Project 9 is a secret research that aims at replacing “the random jumble of our nighttime dreaming with organized thinking and real-life problem solving”¹⁰. In the second part of the book the protagonist, Mae, is the first person to wear a tiny live-streaming camera 24/7, “It saw everything that Mae saw, and often more. The quality of the raw video was such that viewers could zoom, pan, freeze and enhance.”¹¹ Ironically, one of the three so called “Wise Men” who founded the company, comes to realize the dangers and troubles of their original vision, he dreams of biking through the Mongolian steppe – the generative matrix¹² – after having dismantled the Circle.

~ ~ ~The view of the satellite is not least significant because it embeds the cultural politics of self-reflexivity, the re-vision (re-viewing) and positionality in the social construction of technology that is strongly focused on espionage, planetary management and global security. The satellite has often been presented as the ultimate symptom of an age of global visuality.

Does Powers remind us of more spacious forms of perception? Or does the film anticipate gestural interfaces of smartphones and tablets? Zooming in and out – perhaps the film can now recall the relevance of scaling and proportions? Google’s Eric Schmidt said of Google Earth that it “can help us solve global warming because the conversation is fact-based”. What a typical example for what Evgeny Morozov has dubbed Silicon Valley’s “solutionism.” The constant message is: be a do-gooder. Like the dove satellites which Planet Labs is producing to “make global change visible, accessible and actionable for those who need it most. That starts with our flock of satellites, ground stations, and data centers, which will provide the highest cadence imagery of Planet Earth ever collected.” Companies like Planet Labs see their mission as no less than “global stewardship”, aiming to “tackle some of the world’s most complex problems.”

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe presented on the basis of fashion photography in the 1990s, the thesis that “the posthuman is to be found where formerly the humane was to be found: in the appearance of things. What is deeply incomprehensible is the lack of mystery, a condition in which the things of today neither conceal nor reveal. The banality of the posthuman is its only mask and also the only one who is in need.” After Gilbert-Rolfe the incomprehensible takes the place of mystery, because hardly anyone understands now how a computer actually works. What today’s gadgets and interfaces share with fashion photography is their flatness, their slick and shiny surfaces. It seems like users are not supposed to stumble across anything unforeseen or unfamiliar, instead intuitive design is key.

Nevertheless, we seem to be horizontally embedded in networks. How exactly are aesthetics, experience and technology interwoven? Or as Geert Lovink put it in his criticism of the “social” in social networks: “Confined inside the software cages of Facebook, Google, and their clones”,¹³ where there seems to be no perspective left at all. Whereas the vertical mentally allows one to “step outside”, enabling a state of un-embeddedness, the possibility of a distanced “orbital satellite point of view” appeals as a metaphorical withdrawal. Today’s visual culture seems more horizontally oriented, not only due to screens becoming wider and wider (21:9, curved TVs etc.), but also because the footage we are excited about or upset with is mostly recorded during political struggle and warfare (for instance, currently, the ISIS videos in Iraq and Syria) and comes with little context and complexities. The viewer usually happens to be in the middle of things, in the midst of a situation, which does not allow for an overview. There is always the next bite of information, while image formats and displays want to embrace the viewer.¹⁴

So what about our horizontal orientation, is it really there or does embedded really mean neither vertical nor horizontal? This still needs to be discussed. As artist and writer Hito Steyerl already reflected in her article In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective, there is no such thing as a horizon anymore, whereas in the succession of time, there is a discontinuity of both horizontality and verticality.

We are “in a state of transition toward one or several other visual paradigms. Linear perspective has been supplemented by other types of vision to the point where we may have to conclude that its status as the dominant visual paradigm is changing.”¹⁵

Users are mostly interwoven locally in their social networks. Are city planners the only professionals whose job implies thinking from above? At least the way people in these jobs seem to deal with it (and visualize their results), and that is also an evident criticism towards city planning, that it does not take into account social criteria. As Hito Steyerl states on a more abstract level, the “view from above is a perfect metonymy for a more general verticalization of class relations in the context of an intensified class war from above – seen through the lenses and on the screens of military, entertainment, and information industries”.¹⁶ The view from above, does it present rather an illusion in which a techno-consumer democracy is given?

Nevertheless, there is hope according to the author, speaking from an artistic perspective, in “many of these new visualities, what seemed like a helpless tumble into an abyss actually turns out to be a new representational freedom.”¹⁷

The screenplay to Powers of Ten was published as a book titled Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps during 1957, the year Sputnik was launched. This book featured drawings, though in 1946, a rocket-borne 35-millimeter camera attached to a V-2 missile had already provided the first image of earth from space at a distance of 65 miles.¹⁸ Initially, Powers was produced for the Commission on College Physics. The first version, which was released under the lengthy title A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, was produced in 1968¹⁹, the same year the Whole Earth Catalog²⁰ was published. The second IBM-sponsored ²¹ version entitled Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero was made in 1977, the same year Walter de Maria made his work Vertical Earth Kilometer at Documenta in Kassel. Was vertical thought in the air during 1977, following some years of flat horizontal Land Art, dealing with the surfaces of earth?

According to Gisela Parak²², during the first half of the 20th century, aerial views showed modernist utopia, while during the second half, ecological dystopia. Walter de Maria created a vertical hole and filled the hole with solid brass rods, stacked into each other to one kilometer, permanently embedded into the ground. All the viewer can see in Friedrichsplatz is the metal end of one of the rods. At the time Documenta curator Manfred Schneckenburger explained to a German news magazine the work is “a challenge to the imagination” and understood as a “counterpoint to a flooded world of optical signals”. The artist is quoted saying “dirt or soil is not only there to be seen, but also so that you think about it” – a basic idea of Land Art and a comment against the dominant trend of capitalist society towards visualization. Walter de Maria was, like his American artist colleague Robert Smithson, doubtful of the iconic status that pictures of the earth made it look like an object. On the other hand, Smithson had created an iconic Land Art piece with the spiral.²³

So has verticality really been rendered obsolete? Or are we simply not addressed as spectators by vertical visuals? The view from above remained. There is the current obsession with drones, the aerial perspective that people play with on YouTube, and mega drones such as Heron, which can view an entire city instantly. While the citizen remains horizontally embedded in the (matrix) scene, state powers and corporations have access to a transcendent, so to speak, vertical, “larger context”? The story of George Clooney buying satellite footage to watch Omar al-Bashir in Sudan (and warlord Joseph Kony in Uganda), to “Monitor them just like the paparazzi spies on Clooney”²⁴ is worth noting. Clooney functions as his own superpower, a sky ranger seeking vigilante justice. The project he supports, Satellite Sentinel – whose tagline is “The world is watching because you are watching” – buys images of a company called Digital Globe, which crudely named their satellites WorldView-1 and WorldView-2, a disturbing self-image.

The use of satellite imagery has expanded dramatically since the Clinton administration privatized remote sensing and Global Positioning System (GPS) during the nineties, and thus the work of satellite intelligence services changed status. This was an important step, because satellite images were purposed, up to this point, only for the eyes of state espionage officers, scientists and natural resource speculators. Today, commercial satellite operators and government agencies (such as NASA) or public interest groups like Clooney’s circulate high-resolution satellite images online.²⁵

As Lisa Park’s blog reveals, she visited Mongolia at some point. She photographed satellites in the steppe and what she called “wireless phone workers” in the streets of Ulaanbaatar. This summer, when I was there, this niche market has been rendered obsolete. People were equipped with mobile phones.

If the Eameses were to remake Powers today, would they try to get hold of drone footage? Perhaps. On the other hand, it does not carry exclusively positive connotations. And quadcopter footage²⁶? Those are nothing but toy drones designed so that people can familiarize themselves with this ominous technology. What sort of image material would they use to demonstrate computer power? When the Eameses made their film, satellite images where not downloadable from the Internet. What images are equally inaccessible, as exclusive, today? Perhaps images of data centers? Would the Eameses show a horizontal tracking shot through Internet infrastructure?

Interestingly enough, their sponsors, IBM, today run a campaign called “Smarter Planet” which is less about the planet as an object, then about the planet as a figure for a worldwide infrastructure network. There are no images to visualize how a smart planet actually looks like…

Where does Powers take us, back into the world of our senses? Does it anticipate the gestural interface of touch screens? Zooming in and out – maybe today we can look at it as a reminder of the importance of scale. “Mechanical vision emerged because of the focus on relationships and scale providing the direct conduit to emotion as the editors of the piece imagined rather then a conduit to seeing discrete images. This was not training in seeing like a machine, but rather being part of one.”²⁷

In The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man, Hannah Arendt has an interesting take on data, data, she writes are “not phenomena, appearances, strictly speaking, for we meet them nowhere, neither in our everyday world nor in the laboratory; we know of their presence only because they affect our measuring instruments in certain ways.”²⁸ Following Heisenberg she says, as soon as technological progress is not explicable to the world of our senses there is no need for this new technology. Today, discussions on drones and unmanned systems mark a similar point.

While the Eameses originally made the film to familiarize their audience with computer technology, from a contemporary perspective, one could say that Google Earth is a way of familiarizing users with surveillance, with the feeling of being observed from above, of being watched by states-operated technology. However, the “real” military technology is not being used, and the footage isn’t “live”. As Arendt already analyzed on space flight and cosmonautics, it could only be argued against once it becomes evident that this endeavor is “self-defeating in its own terms”. Whereas the Eameses rather visualized human imagination and its power of abstraction in a post-enlightenment approach, Google Earth crosses the digital frontier to embed users into the vertical logic of current power structures, which “secure territories and administer populations from the sky to reorder, reform and remediate life on earth”²⁹. Consequently, the drone is currently the most effective “technology of vertical mediation”, whereas Google Earth as an application provides a digital environment wherein earthly drone infrastructures are mapped.

“All of this makes it more unlikely every day that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not man-made and hence is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a different disguise. The astronaut, shot into outer space and imprisoned in his instrument-ridden capsule where each actual physical encounter with his surroundings would spell immediate death, might well be taken as the symbolic incarnation of Heisenberg’s man—the man who will be the less likely ever to meet anything but himself and man-made things the more ardently he wishes to eliminate all anthropocentric considerations from his encounter with the non-human world around him.”³⁰

The final movement into the microscopic vision is even less non-human. “In a few seconds, we will be entering the skin” – the narrator informs the viewer. With the eyes of Hannah Arendt, it is truly fatal if science is not communicating with our world of senses, if science lacks common language to explain its research (while the military and its R&D institutions like DARPA have always been secretive).

When watching “Powers of Ten” today, one is met with the desire to leave the networked condition. To be elsewhere, either in a macro or a micro world, which in the film, ironically, both look very much the same.

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Vera Tollmann is a writer. In 2013 she co-curated the 9th Video Vortex conference at the Centre for Digital Cultures of Leuphana University Luneburg. Since 2015, Vera is a PhD candidate in the graduate program “Aesthetics of the Virtual” in Hamburg.Recently published essays: “The Uncanny Polar Bear. Activists Visually Attack an Overly Emotionalized Image Clone” in Image Politics of Climate Change. Visualizations, Imaginations, Documentations. (Birgit Schneider, Thomas Nocke (eds.), transcript 2014) and “Exploding Images” in (networked) Every Whisper is a crash on my ears. Anthology, Arcadia Missa (ed.), London 2014.