Cosmic•Atomic

Directed by:

Christopher Boulton

Country:

USA

Runtime:

00:10:00

Summary:

Cosmic•Atomic synchronizes the short film Powers of Ten with its ancestors/descendants, placing the viewer within a 360 degree kaleidoscopic 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 exploring outer space and our inner selves through orders of magnitude.

It then takes us, in turn, to Miami for Charles and Ray Eames’ 1968 “rough sketch” film adaption of Boeke’s book, to Montreal in that 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. Cosmic•Atomic compresses the sixty years of scientific imagination that preceded/followed the Eames’ vision and invites you to feel them all at once.

Cosmic•Atomic [5.7K Trailer] from Dr. Boulton on Vimeo.

Director Bio:

Christopher Boulton As a scholar-filmmaker, my creative work asks critical questions about identity, inequality, and memory. Life After Life (2018), a feature-length documentary about physically integrated dance, challenges stereotypes around race, age, and ability. Every Body Dances (2020) extends the accessibility of that project by adding captions and audio description for the hearing and visually-impaired. Salvage (2020), an experimental film about power, aesthetics, and the consequences of taste, revives old objects to critique consumer capitalism’s historic asymmetries of gender, ethnicity, and class. Salvage has screened at over 30 festivals and won Best Video Essay at the Orlando Film Festival, Special Mention at DocsMX, a Director’s Choice Award from the Thomas Edison Film Festival, and was published in the Hyperrhiz Journal of New Media Cultures.

Cosmic•Atomic (2022) is a 360 video remake of my short Power Trip (2018), which screened at Filmwinter in Germany, Revelation in Australia, Besides the Screen in Brazil, and was published in the [in]Transition Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies.