ABSTRACT
Powers of Ten is a visual poem for the what might be called the View from Nowhere. The aesthetic conceits of scientific objectivity and that of cinematography are not categorically different, but rather variations on shared, long-running themes within Western culture. The root meaning of aesthetics is “perceptibility” as well as “awareness.” Western techniques of framing, isolating, and centering by means of hermetically sealed detectors and double-blind experiments discipline an observer’s perception, just as the visual arts employ frames, spotlights, and the gallery’s white cube as standard devices to create bounded, bubbled spaces of selective attention, as well as cool contemplation. The argument for an aesthetics of the middle is not to dismantle disciplinary knowledge or completely do away their aesthetic techniques, but neither is it to simply add more fine-grained detail. Modern physics has revealed that anywhere and everywhere in the universe is equally its middle by virtue of the fact it has no perceivable center or edge.
