Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Viewings of the thirteen-part 2014 Fox/National Geographic television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey are inevitably refracted through its 1980 predecessor, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, also of thirteen parts. 1 Not only does the first series still possess an enduring life in popular culture, with astronomer and popularizer Carl Sagan a lasting, if now less prominent, icon, but the new series itself explicitly invokes its forerunner.In 1980, the "scientific epic" or "cosmic evolution" projected in the first series was less widely known and elaborated, and the first Cosmos played a substantial role in familiarizing a television and reading public with its universal historical account.That history and scope of the universe, and the media devices domesticating it-initially rendered through the earlier computergraphic and -compositing technologies of the first series-resound through the second series.The continuities from the first to the second Cosmos, from personal voyage to spacetime odyssey, include revised subject matter detailing the impossible breadth (historical and spatial) of the cosmos through identical or similar devices used to survey it: among these, the "Ship of the Imagination" to traverse the universe; the cosmic calendar, contracting the entire history of the universe to one calendar year; and natural historical re-creations and human historical reconstructions.
Source: Technology and Culture
Author: Nasser Zakariya
Language: English
Topic: Art, Technology, and Culture
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4249679745