The Ends of Everythings
Synopsis
The ongoing research project of which EoE Triptych #1 forms a part builds on parallel obsessions with cosmology, deep time and post-apocalyptic scenarios. Reacting to contemporary disaster rhetoric - the end of humanity or post-terrestrial escapology – the work presents the unavoidable future and inescapable apocalypse of the end of the Universe. The human sense of permanence and significance leads us to imagine futures where we are present, having found ways to dominate nature and conquer space. This project argues that there are events from which there is no escape and that all timelines, including the human one, will come to an end. The project develops cultural and scientific narratives around the end of the Universe in three stages.
The End of the Solar System - the point when the Sun expands and becomes a red giant, destroying the Earth. The Sun sheds its outer layers into space before contracting rapidly into a white dwarf star.
The End of the Galaxy and all Stars – the point at which all elements of the local group of galaxies have coalesced into a huge elliptical galaxy while the rest of the universe has retreated beyond the light horizon, forever invisible to future cosmologists. No new stars are born, and this galaxy is full of dying stars, slowly fading to red, before becoming cold, dark remnants..
The End of the Universe – after many billions of trillions of quadrillions of years, after even the black holes have evaporated, the Universe (probably) reaches a state of inert equilibrium known as 'heat death' where nothing more is possible.
Where we imagine permanence, stability and continuity, the Universe presents itself as a fluid entity where stars glow into existence and burn out, where galaxies collide and where eventually all matter will dissipate in a field of cold radiation. It can be said that the very brief existence of stars and planets on the unimaginably long timeline of the Universe is nothing but a momentary glitch in the process of transformation from Big Bang to Heat Death.
An important narrative within the work is the fine balance between knowledge and speculation, how much science has revealed to us about how the Universe works, and how that is leading to us realise how much we still don't know. Our science of the future is based on what we have observed of the last 14 billion years. While our understanding of the Universe and capacity for prediction is astounding, we still cannot be sure that the next thousand trillion years will follow the course we imagine. Everything we know so far points to the ending known as heat death, the slow fading of the Universe into a field of cold radiation, but how can we know if dark energy, dark matter and quantum fluctuations will change things or not?
And in trying to understand these vast cosmic processes, where do we find the space to examine our humanity? How do we confront the melancholy of imagining a future that we can never experience? How can we attribute meaning and significance to something so fleeting and intangible?
WORKS
2022 - EoE Triptych #1 (installation) - LINK
2020 - Termination Shock (video)