First Contact

Titled "First Contact", the phrase comes from science-fiction cinema describing an extraterrestrial civilisation making contact with humanity. For me it is a deeply affecting term: not only an imagination and exploration of the universe, but also a break in my own cognition. Moving from far to near, the work adopts the viewpoint of an unknown civilisation — from the cosmos to Earth, to all living things: particles flowing to represent the ocean, contour-like particle movements to represent continents. The score borrows music from Oppenheimer, moving from silence to sound — every contact between civilisations is an instant of explosion, silent and violent.

"The work reflects on information entropy and the limits of cognition in a digital age: of everything our senses take in each day, how much is signal and how much is merely noise — and a true "contact" often arrives first as silence."