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Welcome to the Transcalar Imaginary
"The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms." Muriel Rukeyser
The stories we tell ourselves about the cosmos shape our experiences of reality. We interpret our experiences through ever-shifting lenses of enculturation, embodiment, and enaction, which continually shape the explanatory maps and narratives we create to account for the nature of existence. Recognizing our unique perspectives, as well as how they might be expanded, requires identifying the influences and assumptions within which they are enmeshed. While language can provide conceptual descriptors of these processes, sensuous experience can reveal the more immediate role played by perception in the shaping of our understanding and intuitions.
The Transcalar Imaginary refers to the ever-shifting worlds we construct within our individual and collective minds' eye, imagining connections between everyday experience and realms beyond immediate, unaided perception. These visions are the result of the dynamic interplay between empirical observations, ecological contexts, and creative representations of phenomena, reinforcing the cultural narratives that inform how we make sense of reality. The extent to which we can recognize patterns and traverse scales of time, space, and frequency within our imaginations greatly influences our abilities to anticipate and adapt to changing environments - a skill that has been essential for human evolution.
But if, as Alan Watts suggested, we are apertures through which the Universe is looking at itself, it seems that the capacities afforded by our self-conscious cognitive abilities are increasingly paradoxical. For instance, the scientific revolution was instigated by the enhanced ability to envision the world from an "objective" god's eye view from outside of the realm of immediate experience. However, as the tendency to percieve the human intellect as being seperate from nature has been pushed to its logical extreme, our sense of the "real" universe has all but been abstracted into a remote, mathematical oblivion. As physicists construct elaborate machines to search for elusive subatomic particles to account for "dark" forces that apparently permeate the vast cosmos, the accelerating destabilization of the biosphere due to human activity is providing stark reminders that our well-being is intimately connected to the regenerative capacity of our home planet's ecosystems. And even as scientific inquiries reveal the mysteries of creation at an unprecedented pace, our collective imagination continues to be constrained by a global economic system that emphasizes the importance of quarterly profits over all else.
Fortunately, the ongoing dissolution of boundaries between the arts, sciences, and humanities are sounding the alarm to wake us up from the hypnotic reductionist story of the modern era. Instead of being entranced by the myths of objective observers, rational actors, and the need for infinite growth, new possibilities are emerging from the accelerated capacity for hyper-networked collaboration. By transcending the limiting confines of hyperspecialized and myopic perspectives, we seem to have the opportunity to more fully realize our potential as symbiotic participants within a sentient and interdependent cosmos.
This collection of sites is an invitation to explore the ways in which our expanded capacity to collectively share our stories and perspectives are informing new ways of seeing, knowing, and acting in the world. But hopefully this is more than an intellectual exercsie. Once your Transcalar Imaginary is sufficiently exercised, hop on over to http://www.scoop.it/t/design-science to see how the recurring principles and successful habits of the cosmos are being intentionally applied to design a world that works for 100% of humanity. 
This interactive infographic accurately illustrates the scale of over 100 items within the observable universe ranging from galaxies to insects, nebulae and stars to molecules and atoms. This is a galaxy. Or is it? A remix of material originally produced for BBC Stargazing Live 2012 
We are no longer so excited as formerly by the account of trips on the surface … The mind is stretched, uncomfortably sometimes, but with a new fascination, to speed and profundity, to the thought of worlds that lie a million light-years away from us, to the worlds that recede in evolutionary time beneath the lens, to the thought even that they merge or that by some extraordinary trick of relativity the smaller may contain the large. There is an affinity between the telescope and the microscope, between the discovery of stellar space and the discovery of the atom. "We are surrounded by mysterious worlds. Worlds hidden from us by their sizes, too small or too large to be noticed. But now it's possible to see these world... Round and round with nature's fundamental patterns... Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell. 
by Thich Nhat Hanh
You manifested more than 4 and a half billion years ago and life began to manifest on you less that one billion years later. Since then, you have gradually become the beautiful living planet that you are today. Life evolved from deep within the oceans, multiplying and prospering on your body, slowly improving the atmosphere so that countless species could manifest. After one billion years, there was enough free oxygen in the atmosphere to create the ozone layer, which then prevented harmful radiation from reaching your surface, thus allowing life to develop on land. 
The geometry of Fractals brings us a new appreciation for the natural world Via Anne Caspari 
BALTIMORE—Scientists now have access to clear images of the multicolored polygons and sparkling glitter believed to cover up to 99.999 percent of the universe. 
Astronomers declared the Hubble Space Telescope a fully rejuvenated observatory with the release of observations from four of its six operating science instruments. 
Many scientists and theorists claim that the Gaia hypothesis is merely a fancy name for a set of interactions, between organisms and their presumably inorganic environment, that have long been known to science. Every high school student is familiar with the fact that the oxygen content of the atmosphere is dependent on the photosynthetic activity of plants. The Gaia hypothesis, according to such researchers, offers nothing substantive. It is simply a new—and unnecessarily obfuscating—way of speaking of old facts. In the dismissive words of biologist Stephen Jay Gould: "the Gaia Hypothesis says nothing new—it offers no new mechanisms. It just changes the metaphor. But metaphor is not mechanism!" |
A rapid-fire history of our world, from the beginning of time as we know it to present day. This two-hour CGI-driven special delves into the key turning points: the formation of earth, emergence of life, spread of man and the growth of civilization--and reveals their surprising connections to our world today. This is the film from the Greenwich Royal Observatory's micro exhibition 'Measuring the Universe: from the transit of Venus to the edge of the cosmos'. 
Throughout history, human civilizations have been guided by interpretations of the cosmic order. Our ancestors observed patterns in nature that profoundly influenced their beliefs and behaviors, enabling them to anticipate and synchronize with the cycles of life. By paying close attention to the world around them, countless generations developed reciprocal relationships with environments that enabled them to survive and thrive.
Today, modern technologies enable us to manipulate our surroundings in extraordinary ways. Yet they also isolate us, encouraging us to take the life-sustaining systems of our home planet for granted as endlessly exploitable resources and economic externalities. As specialized sciences increasingly seek to reduce existence to its component parts, the universe has seemingly been diminished to little more than physical properties, isolated interactions, and mathematical laws. 
No one knows exactly how large the universe is. It could be infinite or it could have an edge, meaning that traveling for long enough in one direction will bring you back to where you started, like traveling on the surface of a sphere.
Scientists argue over the exact shape and size of the universe but they can calculate one thing with good precision: how far away we can see. Light travels at a specific speed, and because the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old, we can’t see anything farther away than 13.7 billion light years away, right? 
The field of design practice must always respond to the broader culture in order to stay relevant. To achieve this there must be a constant dialogue between all forms of enquiry, ranging from the specific to the general and from the very large to the very small. Throughout the history of human society there have been different means of understanding the relation between the very large to the very small. A similar structure exists at all scales: a dynamic relational network that underlies all systems and phenomena. These are constantly changing, adapting and emerging to create higher levels of complexity. 
It isn’t just privacy that is at stake, here – it is the discrete self of rational ethics, an individual with the audacity to say, as Ayn Rand did, “Nobody helped me,” and ignore the trillions of bacterial cells covering and constituting every cell of her body, breathing the air and eating the sugar. To say it takes a village to raise a child is a severe understatement, and increasingly the average person seems aware that the average person is a village, and a global village. 
Zoom from the edge of the universe to the quantum foam of spacetime and learn the scale of things along the way! FIAT LUX is an ode to the creative muses and the evolution of consciousness, following the beginning of the universe from big bang to evolution of life and the creative instinct that sparks eternal. We have no ways to directly observe molecules and what they do -- Drew Berry wants to change that. At TEDxSydney he shows his scientifically accurate (and entertaining!) animations that help researchers see unseeable processes within our own cells. The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010. Consciousness defies definition. Perhaps no aspect of mind is more familiar or more puzzling than consciousness and our conscious experience of self and world. _Why are we so interested in consciousness? Most people are interested because of their personal experience - we have consciousness, we experience it; perhaps we even think that we ''are'' it. But, if we are to make progress in understanding consciousness, we will have to think about it very clearly, and engage in serious constructive dialogues between varieties of viewpoints. 
A blog about visualization, visual language, visuospatial intelligence and the rise of the global mind by former Buckminster Fuller archivest and transcalarite extraordinaire, Bonnie Devarco |
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