Shadow of Unknowing, 2024

interactive live simulation

72 minutes

Shadow of Unknowing (SoU) is an existential cosmic simulation: a meditation on uncertainty and the unknown. It explores the limits of human perception and understanding of the universe, and our attempts through scientific and spiritual means to establish absolute truth and certainty in a vast, unknowable cosmos. Split across three views, it follows the slow, looping journey of a Traveller and an Observer through a black hole and white hole as they are destroyed and reincarnate time and time again. Locked into this cyclic cosmic dance, their experience of reality changes the more they come to understand - though through the powerful effects of the black hole on spacetime, their experience of reality is not always the same.

Inspired by exchanges with mathematicians and physicists at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (Edinburgh, UK) and the Black Hole Initiative (Cambridge, USA), SoU explores the paradoxical nature of black holes: how they unravel our understanding of time and causality, preservation and loss, and what this could imply about our assumptions around absolute truth, the self and the soul, free will and fate.

Over six loops and random incarnations of the Traveller across human, animal, and metaphysical beings, SoU entangles the distortion of spacetime with the transformation of self. The paradoxes of the universe are reflected in the nature of our shadow-selves. Like the interiors of black holes which remains an area of scientific speculation, confronting the void within oneself is likewise daunting, uncharted territory. In both cases, pushing through the unknown leads to complete transformation: a moment of death, rebirth, and awakening.