What are the limits of knowledge? Where is there still mystery, and how are researchers moving towards these "unknown" territories? Futurefarmers Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine ask these and other questions as part of a multifaceted research project inspired by Charles and Ray Eames's film, Powers of Ten (1977).

Powers of Ten is a short documentary film that depicts the relative scale of the universe in factors of ten. It illustrates the universe as an arena of both continuity and change, of everyday picnics and cosmic mystery. One iconic image from the film depicts a couple picnicking on a blanket, serving as a human-scale grounding for the macro- and micro-explorations in the film. Futurefarmers uses this film as a conceptual and aesthetic framework for exploring related ideas - the production of knowledge; how its limits are understood, measured, represented, and transgressed; and the relationship between diverse fields of inquiry. With methods both formal and informal, the research framework includes ten picnics with invited scholars, recasting the picnic blanket as a space where the quotidian and the cosmic comingle, as a simple picnic serves as the setting for folding scientific, theoretical, and philosophical conversation into everyday ritual. These research moments will be documented and made available through the project website and related publication and programming.

A Variation works with museum's who are embedded inside major research institutions.

Unlike exhibitions where the final products of thought, inquiry, and production are presented as static objects, this project foregrounds the process of thought and inquiry as its own production. It engages in forms that are fluid, contingent, and mutable - the picnic, the conversation, the workshop - as a means to extend the metaphor of research and discovery into the arena of public presentation. As more research institutions receive funding from private corporations, much of their research occurs behind closed doors. This project is fueled by an interest in bringing this research out into the public eye and ear and inviting the discourse of academic research into an art context and vice versa.

Like all research, the project is driven in both form and content by questions; importantly, these are not just concrete questions about what we know and how we know it, but fuzzier questions about the use and consequences of that knowledge. Where does the desire to expand our knowledge and understanding come from? To what lengths will we go to "know?" Who is impacted by this quest and where has this knowledge led us? What is the human factor within the search for knowledge? Like the film Powers of Ten, A Variation is a journey through various fields of inquiry, from human psychology and philosophy to ecology, microbiology, astrobiology, environmental science, and zoology, that collects and presents knowledge (in this case, as it is constituted inside a major university) that will provide a contemporary portrait of various perspectives on our changing world.