Cançado, Wellington and Renata Marquez. 2010. Myopia Index. Surveillance & Society, Special Issue on Surveillance, Performance and New Media Art, ed. John McGrath and Robert Sweeny, 7(2): 126-143. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org | ISSN: 1477-7487 © The author(s), 2010 | Licensed to the Surveillance Studies Network under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license . ! This essay is accompanied by the film, Global Safari – see the Abstract or go direct to: http://blip.tv/file/3698794/ Wellington Cançado Federal University of Minais Gerais, Brazil, inhame@hotmail.com Renata Marquez Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil renamarquez@gmail.com Powers of Ten Powers of Ten is a nine-minute documentary that addresses the concept of scale during the observer’s journey on the size of things in the universe. In the film, commissioned from the couple Charles and Ray Eames by IBM in 1977, the camera, which captures the images, is the mechanism that sets a dizzying view of the scenes into motion and shows the relative size of things, always shifting the vertical distances that change due to the effect of adding another zero to the initial altitude of 1 meter: 10 meters, 100 meters, 1000 meters, 10,000 meters... At each zero added, the camera moves away at intervals of ten seconds, always on a vertical axis related to the surface of the Earth, taking us exponentially away from the human scale presented in the first frame of the movie. In offering the fantastic adventure of a radically accelerated flight out of the Milky Way and afterwards in the opposite direction towards the interior of the microscopy of the body, Powers of Ten has its beginning in the context of a daily activity, in late October, in a park in Chicago, USA. Colorful and musical, with the pictorial qualities of still lives and landscapes, the image of a lively picnic of an anonymous couple is the reference point of the journey. It is the apparently stable time from which the perspective is mobilized and to which the observer finally returns. The Eames made a series of films in which they investigated the discursive languages of visual arts applied to science, articulating design tools and techno-scientific information. The accessibility of information, its translation into an artistic and intelligent visuality, of trivial coincidence and practical optimism is present in Powers of Ten, as well as in dozens other films on scientific concepts, among them Atlas (1976), Copernicus (1973), The House of Science (1964) and Do-nothing Machine (1957). Powers of Ten is an adaptation of the book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, published in 1957 by the Dutch educator Kees Boek. In the book addressing children, the author proposes a study on the perception of scale, a “graphic journey through the universe” composed out of 40 images that show both the infinity of galaxies and the nuclei of atoms in a double movement: first the escape from the Earth and then the invasion of the body. In “Cosmic View,” there is also an initial reference point that seems familiar. The photography of a girl, viewed from above, leaning back in a chair is the image that starts the journey. With the scientific advice of Philip and Phylis Morrison, Cosmic View was adapted and animated by the Eames, turning into Powers of Ten, twenty years later. Essay Myopia Index ! !