Is it about the nascent field of urban ecology?  The science of water?  Microscopic adventures?  Click the image above (from the collection of the Wellcome Library in London, an “1828 etching by William Heath depicting a woman dropping her teacup in horror on discovering the monstrous contents of a magnified drop of water from the Thames, at the time the source of London’s drinking water”) to read Mark Dorrian’s captivating means of introducing a film, using a couple ideas and images that

anticipated future expressions of the new adventure on the vertical, perhaps the most striking of which would be Charles and Ray Eames’s short film Powers of Ten.

Is it about vertical perspective?  The images below are from the book version of Powers of Ten, by Philip and Phylis Morrison and the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, published in 1982 about which Dorrian says:

The film Powers of Ten was first made as a trial version in 1968, and then remade and released in 1977 in the familiar form that has been so widely disseminated in both film and printed formats. Produced by the Eames Office, the Los Angeles-based firm founded by the husband-and-wife design team, the 1977 version was one of the couple’s final films.

Powers of Ten was originally inspired by a 1957 book by the Dutch educator Kees Boeke titled Cosmic View. By 1963, the Eameses were experimenting with tracking shots that gave the effect of a camera pulling away with accelerating motion from an object, and in 1968 used these in a film called A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe.

And the observation we like best:

While Powers of Ten seems more about magnification and resolution than mobility, commentaries have tended to dwell on the visceral (that word is often used) sense of travel it provokes.