Abstract
The telescope and microscope are among humanity’s crowning achievements. Each provides affordances for seeing what was previously unseen. The data that these instruments and their permutations have allowed us to gather and the resulting new understandings have utterly transformed human knowledge over and over again1. Today, transitions in the media landscape—24-hour cable news networks, interactive media, blogs, tweets, comment strings, etc.—alter both how and what we know about our world. Despite the frenzy of the popular press over nature-related stories, about the latest climate change findings or giant storms and forest fires, popular media generally fail to impart a deep understanding of the natural world.
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Notes
Charles and Ray Eames’ seminal film Powers of Ten (1977), adapted from the book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, is a rich example of the seamless stitching together of different technologies to provide a breathtaking and smooth traverse from the molecular scale to the scale of the known universe, zooming out at the rate of one power of ten per ten seconds. This sense of scale was not previously demonstrable in such a visual and visceral way.
James E. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979): 100–102.
Lyn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
James E. Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
James McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971). Exceptions are communities of organisms that form around deep undersea water vents and the deep hot biosphere, which are not yet likely to be significantly impacted by human activities.
William F Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005): 76–83.
Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre, Second Edition (Indianapolis: Addison-Wesley, 2014): 21–28.
Aristotle, The Poetics, translated by W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater (New York: Modern Library Books, 1954). 1448b: 15–20.
Aristotle, Nicomacean Ethics, Translated by Sarah Broadie and Christopher Rowe (Oxford University Press, 2002). II.2: 1103b–1104b.
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© 2015 Jordan Geiger
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Laurel, B. (2015). Looking into Nature: Learning and Delight in a STE[A]M Park. In: Geiger, J. (eds) Entr’acte. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137414182_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137414182_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49280-0
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