CLIMATE: VISUALIZING THE INVISIBLE 

A media project to make visible our Planet’s climate thru visualizing our atmosphere.

Statement of Plans by Filmmaker/Professor Ben Shedd 

From the Fullness of the Sky to its Molecular Gases.

This application is for support for creative development time to write and design CLIMATE: VISUALIZING THE INVISIBLE, a digital new media Art/Science video, plus ancillary written and visual material1. 

From Buckminster Fuller: “When I was born in 1895, reality was everything you could see, smell, touch and hear. The world was thought to be absolutely self-evident. When I was 3 years old, the electron was discovered. That was the first invisible. It didn’t get in any of the newspapers; (nobody thought that would be important!) Today 99.99% of everything that affects our lives cannot be detected by the human senses. We live in a world of invisibles.”3

The goal of this project is to make our invisible atmosphere, what looks like empty space all around us, which is actually full of the dense dance of oxygen and nitrogen atoms, into a visible active part of our lives. It will make visible what we have learned about the chemical details of on-going climate change, the human-emitted invisible carbon dioxide knocking our atmosphere out of balance, those “400 parts per million of CO2” in our atmosphere we hear about, or, said in smaller, clearer numbers, 40 parts per 100,000 or 4 parts per 10,000. Why is the difference between 2.5 parts per 10,000 of CO2 compared to 4 parts per 10,000 of CO2 changing our weather and our lives all over the planet? Making the molecular chemistry visible and those large numbers understandable and accessible knowledge are the specific intentions of this project.2. 

When we film or photograph anything, it shows the world just like our eyes see it, as if it is empty open space, as if there is nothing around us. I want to make this invisible knowable, to make accessible to all of us the dense ocean of air we swim in every moment of our lives.

This is not a new idea. Physicist Evangelista Torricelli wrote in 1644: “We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air.”6. It is time we all learn how we are swimming in this ocean of air.

This ocean of mostly oxygen and nitrogen is what connects us directly to each other. It is our atmosphere pushing down on us and which thins out as we go progressively higher in altitude.  And it all looks the same – empty – whether we are at sea level, at high mountain altitudes or flying overhead. But this seeming nothingness is our very life. The game changer for me in my initial research was learning that our breathable atmosphere, which keeps us alive, is only 10 kilometers high, just about twice the length of Central Park in NYC. If we tilt Central Park on end and double it’s height, this is the upper limit of our useable, life giving atmosphere even though it looks like it goes up forever.

I have directed and produced 20 science documentaries among the 36 films/videos in my career, ranging from television documentaries for the PBS NOVA science series to IMAX 70mm Science Museum immersive science movies4. With my first independent science film forty-six years ago, the 1978 Academy Award winning Documentary Short THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR, I began to learn about – and think about – the invisible fullness and real density of air, at the core of this climate research. The Gossamer Condor human-powered airplane – the slowest flying plane in the world weighing only two hundred pounds – floats through and in the invisible density of the ocean of air that we all live within. From that small visual start, I have been “seeing” and imagining this fullness more clearly over the decades thru on-going research5. 

Visualizing the fullness of what surrounds us, what we call “the air”, which is in fact a densely packed, weighty chemical mixup of gases that we buffer against at every moment and breath in every moment and hear sound from its vibrations at every moment. It is challenging to propose making media/movies about what appears to be invisible, supposedly empty space against the solidness of our bodies and the earth. I have been diving down 10 to 12 orders of magnitude in size and scale9 to imagine and “see” where climate change is taking place, at the level of molecules in the trillions – the excess carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, with it’s small vibrating chemical links trapping infrared waves.

I have learned, through research, that in every cubic meter of our near earth atmosphere, there are 10 trillion trillion molecules of gas10, mostly nitrogen and oxygen atoms, all very real and we don’t see it. Professor Curt Stager writes in his book YOUR ATOMIC SELF11, “The atmosphere literally becomes a part of you every time you draw a breath, and part of you returns to it on every outgoing breath as well.” And in his book DEEP FUTURE: THE NEXT 100,000 YEARS OF LIFE ON EARTH he writes: “Artificial greenhouse gases are as real and present in our daily lives as the Anthropocene is…If they were large enough to be seen with the unaided eye, it would be impossible for anyone to ignore them.”

This project will make air visual and part of our everyday lives. The Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries12 which we need to live within, combined with the livable “safe and just space for humanity” developed in Kate Raworth’s Oxfam Research and book, DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS,13 provides visual cores for this research.  

One way I am finding to get us to start knowing that all this empty space around us is indeed full is to suggest putting one’s hand out the window of a moving car. Doing it safely of course. What we feel is not the wind blowing on our hand at all – it is our hand pushing through the thick density of the air all around us, often “flying” through the dense air when we flatten our fingers and make a “wing”14. This becomes startlingly apparent when doing it on a windless quiet day. Not only can we feel our hand swimming/pushing through the air, but we can hear it so loudly, rattling all the molecules around us and those vibrating molecules shaking/vibrating our tiny ear drums with roaring sounds. It is almost just like swimming through the density of water, except air is 784 times less dense than water15.  Because it is less dense, it is easy to think there is nothing around us. And this gets us thinking about the density of air every car is pushing out of the way, and which is the very reason we need some kind of fuel to propel our vehicles through the air, which gets us thinking about all the ways we use fossil fuels. 

I have made science media on challenging topics before, such as the ways we learned the reasons for the SEASONS through our expanding understanding of Astronomy over the past 1,000 years and the 400,000,000 year evolution of the TROPICAL RAINFOREST on our planet with the rapid rate of change we are now living in. Both of these stories were made larger and unique by immersing audiences in their macro and micro details and beauty. When I finished making the SEASONS IMAX Dome film, one review headlined “Poetry meets Technology in IMAX”16 I was so glad that the artistry of that film was recognized as well as the science story and the production craft within it. This new media project CLIMATE: VISUALIZING THE INVISIBLE will be a call to action by immersing us in our 2.3 billion year old oxygen and our quite recent 200 year old increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and making visible the flows of energy and interlocking chemistry all around the Earth at many visual scales. From the planetary to the personal to molecular and back, it will bond viewers, all of us, to the reasons and necessity to keep our atmosphere livable for all, including we humans.

Visualizing and animating the atmosphere for involved professionals and for the anxious public beyond those with molecular knowledge will make it possible for all of us to imagine and know the details and fullness of the air around us where our climate and weather happen. This is needed knowledge for creating possible solutions. There are lots of things invisible that we humans have learned about in the past few hundred years – dark matter, radiation, gravity – which are vast and often far out of mind. There is something invisible so close that we live in it and are with it every moment, our atmosphere.    I have found that to know it as dense and full of our very chemistry of life changes everything.

Excerpt from the Wall Street Journal review By Joe Morgenstern IMAX IN THE RAINFOREST  FEBRUARY 21, 1992 

“One of the best IMAX documentaries is the most recent, “Tropical Rainforest.” This 39-minute film brings viewers closer to the complex reality of its subject…What’s more, it maintains a scrupulously proper sense of relationships; not just big and little, though IMAX is great at dramatizing that, but long and short – 400 million years for the planet’s equatorial rain forests to evolve, a few decades to bring them to the brink of destruction…Given the gravity of the situation, however, reverence for nature and respect for science can go only so far. The most important point is that rain forests are being destroyed, and (Director) Shedd makes it powerfully by letting the subject speak for itself.”18

One of my key plans with creating CLIMATE: VISUALIZING THE INVISIBLE is, again like the TROPICAL RAINFOREST film, to “let the subject speak for itself” by giving us visual tools to fill in the seeming invisible space we are immersed in. We will be able to imagine, ‘see’, and know about carbon dioxide emissions so we can know what we are doing individually and collectively all over the planet. We will be able to see every place that spews out carbon or soaks in carbon to understand and know the connections, some visible, most invisible, and to be able to take actions and steer our climate crisis around toward a healthy future. This project will provide very usable visual tools for all of us to be able to ‘see’ the inner workings of our molecular atmosphere, from the macro to the micro, so we can reimagine how to make real world solutions and change our future. 

Even though we can’t see it, we are deeply a part of the air around us with very breath we take and every sound we hear and everything we see. It is time to know our atmosphere as dense, complex, understandable, and repairable. Our very lives depend upon it.

Footnotes for Ben Shedd Statement of Plans Application 2024:

  1. Including creating a website, video test sequences, research publications, social media outreach, and animation tests.
  2. NUMBER NUMBNESS in METAMAGICAL THEMAS by Douglas Hofstadter. Basic Books, Perseus books group. c1985. & MAKING NUMBERS COUNT by Chip Heath & Karla Star. Simon & Shyster Books. c2022.
  3. Quoted in the book “A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller” by Amy C. Edmondson. Emergent World Press. c1987, 1992, 2007
  4. Ben Shedd Films & Videos  https://benshedd.com/films-and-videos/  Accessed 16Sept2021
  5. THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR website  https://gossamercondor.com  Accessed 16Sept2021
  6. Sourced from SCIENCE: The Definitive Guide. DK/Penguin Random House Smithsonian. 2011
  7. THE SUNPOT MYSTERY NOVA 1976  Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/TheSunspotMystery Access 16Sept2021
  8. See Books and Research on website “Ben Shedd Climate Documentaries Works-In_Progess”: https://benshedd.com/climate-documentaries-works-in-progress-proposals/ Accessed 7Sept2024
  9. ATOMIC EVIDENCE Seeing the Molecular Basis of Life by David Goodsell. Springer International Publishing 2016
  10. Mastin, L. [October 2009] HOW MANY MOLECULES/ATOMS ARE THERE IN EACH CUBIC METER? Retrieved September 12 2021 from https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/how-many-molecules-atoms-are-there-in-each-cubic-metre.html.
  11. Stager, Curt YOUR ATOMIC SELF The Invisible Elements That Connect You to Everything Else in the Universe. Thomas Dunn Books. St. Martin’s Publishing Group c2014  and DEEP FUTURE: THE NEXT 100,000 YEARS OF LIFE ON EARTH Thomas Dunn Books. St. Martin’s Publishing Group c2011
  12. BIG WORLD SMALL PLANET: Abundance within Planetary Boundaries by Johan Rockström, and Mattias Klum with Peter Miller;  Max Ström Publishing. Yale University Press c2015
  13. DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist by Kate Raworth; Chelsea Green Publishing c2017
  14. See Hand in Air/Water photos on link “Ben Shedd Climate Documentaries Works-In-Progess”: https://benshedd.com/climate-documentaries-works-in-progress-proposals/ Accessed 7Sept2024
  15. Meteorologist Jeff Haby. https://www.theweatherprediction.com/habyhints/216/ Accessed 16Sept2021
  16. City Pages, St. Paul, July 17, 1987 https://benshedd.com/excerpts-from-reviews-for-imaxomnimax-giant-screen-films/  Accessed 16Sept2021

          17.       Wall Street Journal review By Joe Morgenstern IMAX IN THE RAINFOREST  FEBRUARY 21, 1992