Horton's Cosmic Zoom: A Discussion with Zachary Horton

Today Recall this Book welcomes Zachary Horton, Associate Professor of Literature and director of the Vibrant Media Lab at University of Pittsburgh; game designer, filmmaker and camera designer. Out of all these endeavors, he came to talk about his book The Cosmic Zoom Scale, Knowledge, and Mediation.

This dizzying book begins with a bravura description of a movie we both loved as kids: The Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames. It's a view of two people enjoying a picnic zooms up and away to show their surroundings, all the way up into space then zooms back in for a close-up of the hand of the picnicker, ending top at the atomic level . The book, uses the cosmic zoom as a starting point to develop a cross-disciplinary theory of scale as mediated difference.

Zack shares his worries about scale literacy, and what happens when we diverge from the "meso-scale of the human sensorium." John approaches scale by way of Naturalism and SF in the late 19th century, both of which refuse the meso-scale aesthetic realism of their day in order to anchor it at a different scale. Elizabeth asks about temporal scales and geology's activation of human sense of humans' scalar insignificance.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Italo Calvino The Complete Cosmicomics
• The Holy Bible
• Kees Boeke, Cosmic View: the University in 40 Jumps
• PBS, The Bigger Picture
• Voltaire, Micromegas
• Mark Twain, 3000 Years Among the Microbes

Read transcript here.

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