More on the Productions of Charles and Ray Eames

If anyone is looking for more insight into the educational and scientific films of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, JCMS pulblished an article titled, "Other Ends of Cinema: Powers of Ten, Exponential Data, and the Archive of Scientific Images" by Kyle Stine in the Winter 2020 edition. The abstract does it better justice than my own summar could:

From 1957 to 1977, the Office of Charles and Ray Eames worked with IBM on a series of films and exhibitions to promote the social benefits of the computer. Across these projects, the office developed strategies of programming spectator journeys through spaces of information. It is in this context that one should understand the Eameses' most iconic film, Powers of Ten (1968, 1977). Recognizing film as an information medium, the Eames Office produced Powers of Ten as a form of visual software capable of preprocessing a vast archive of scientific images for the viewer, just as a computer executes its most fundamental processes behind the interface. Their efforts, alongside developments in microfilm storage and retrieval, point to film's role as the first universal medium to process image, sound, text, and data.

I find the article interesting, if only tangentially relavent to television, because the article centers on issues of materiality and labor, particularly the research labor required to find and present the material artifacts shown in Powers of Ten. I speculate that the liveness and flow of television (I speak of the television apparatus contemporary with Powers of Ten, the 60s and 70s) demanded content that could be produced on a much quicker, repeatable timescale. It's apparent from the article that the Eameses were chasing a cinematic train on divergent tracks from the dominant commercial mode of production. Should early television have pursued such research intensive visual projects, I believe a few problems would be encountered. First, such tedious research requires flexible project management to account for unforeseen problems on the fact-finding mission. Second, following from the first, exhaustive research of the manner the Eames Office produced would require radically unique visual representations that would likely disrupt the regular flow of nightly programming. Third, any visual representation of the detail at which the Eames Office insisted wouldn't register on early television sets due to size and resolution.