09.

Kees Boeke in his essay Cosmic View (from 1957) conveys the size of the cosmos via a series of images, each scaled up by a power of ten across forty jumps in viewpoint: from a sodium nucleus (at 10^-13 m) to a galaxy cluster (at 10²⁶ m). Boeke depicts a scene, situated at the scale of a Dutch child, holding a cat in her lap while seated in the yard of her school in Bilthoven, near Utrecht.⁹ Boeke devotes one page to each jump, “zooming away” from her hand, past a city, a star, a nebula, until reaching a cosmic limit, then “zooming down” into her hand, past a mite, a cell, a virion, until reaching an atomic limit. Boeke places the child in a mise en abyme, whose levels of recursive reframing (distanced, then magnified) almost recall the Droste effect, seen in the image of a Dutch nurse, shown at two varied scales, one nested in the other, on packages of Droste cocoa.