Scale Narrative

Chris Parrinello
Arch 102
Scale Narrative

Scale is relative. This is the basis for my thinking. I am not exactly sure how to blog a narrative, but here is my jumbled attempt.
After watching Powers of Ten a couple of weeks ago, and again today trying to think about our project at the same time, I began to think about how scale works. I thought about how Powers of Ten works, by zooming out and then back in. This alters your sense of time and space, and in turn scale. The world is very large in comparison to the opening scene of the picnic blanket. But when you zoom out to the extents of the universe, the once large entity becomes so small, not even visible. Then, you zoom all the way in and things that couldn’t even be seen before take up the whole picture. And this microscopic scene at times resembles the vast expanse of the universe. The Beatles lyrics “Life Goes On Within You and Without You” comes to mind here. This shows the relationship between things of different sizes. Without another object for comparison, these things, like the earth and the carbon atom, could be the same size. By zooming in and out, sense of scale is lost.
I thought of this alteration in scale as worlds within worlds. The cell is a world within the man’s body, the man within the world, the world within the galaxy, the galaxy within the universe. The list of subdivisions could go on forever. This concept of worlds within worlds strikes me as relating to our projects. You have Brooklyn, then Red Hook, The Columbia Street Pier, and the Grain Terminal. We are then putting our museum inside. And the worlds within the museums are the exhibitions. Then as a viewer, you get lost in the pieces and works. Because this is a museum of drag, this idea of scale can be subversive. Red Hook is fragmented off from the rest of Brooklyn. The site then is in a way separated from the rest of Red Hook in terms of its size and appearance. Our museums are subversive, so they break apart from the conventional uses for museums. And finally, a person gets lost in the idea of a transgressive piece of art, and they become pulled away from society. Each of these “worlds” fits inside the one before it, but they are different, or subversive to the one before it. (Red Hook is broken away from the rest of Brooklyn, the site is a misfit compared to the surrounding area, etc.) It is almost the concept of fractal geometry turned subversive. For those who don’t know, fractal geometry is the idea that every shape is made up of fractals. A fractal is a geometric shape that when broken up, the parts are reduced sized copies of the whole. In our case, as we break apart the whole, each part is distinct from the whole. In terms of Powers of Ten, as we zoom in, things change, and become different from what the previous screen shot appeared to be because of it’s transgressions and subversions.