Robin Meier Wiratunga’s Sea of Noise

James Webb Space Telescope deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date

Based on his research at CERN, artist and composer Robin Meier Wiratunga shares an excerpt from his work-in-progress spoken word and sound performance Sea of Noise

During his residency at CERN, Meier Wiratunga focused his artistic research on cosmological theories about the end of the universe, working in close dialogue with theoretical physicists. Blending poetic language and cosmological narrative, Sea of Noise leads us from the birth of the universe, through a bodily encounter inside the Large Hadron Collider, to its heat death, inviting an embodied meditation on our personal and cosmic ends.

Sea of Noise

13.8 billion years ago (give or take)
there was a phase transition of the Higgs Field.

A lake frozen solid starting to thaw
or water just about to boil
watching bubbles at the bottom of a kettle
the universe as we experience it here and now
like a bubble in the pot.

Then, particles form, light beams travel,
matter and anti-matter cancel each other out,
like opposing ripples on the surface of the water.
Strangely, a little more matter remains
stars and galaxies form,
life emerges,
we split the atom,
empires rise and ebb,
MAGA, ChatGPT, Taylor Swift, MAGA again and here we are:
On the cusp
of the sixth mass extinction,
of nuclear war, the AI takeover,
the imminent collapse of ecology, society,
and the world as we know it.

Now, take a deep breath,
close your eyes,
exhale,
release all your tensions

and relax.

Focus on the centre of your field of vision
and slowly count down from a hundred,
opening your eyes with each even number
and closing them with each odd number.

100
99
98
97

…

As I count down
you notice
how easy it is
to become absorbed
in this process
this ritual
this feeling.

Perfect

You’re sinking through your seat
into the ground,
through the ground,
like through a soft cushion,
traversing a concrete shell,
you enter the Large Hadron Collider.

You’re in a tunnel
filled with cylindrical blue magnets
surrounded by a hum of electricity.
You feel the regular pulse
in the radio frequency cavities
bunching together the particles
of two opposing beams
accelerated near the speed of light.
You collide and
explode into a flock
of new matter.

Become aware
of the temperature around you.
Feel how the heat flows
between your body
and the air enveloping it.

Any hot object transfers heat
to its colder surroundings
until everything
is at the same temperature.

Feeling this thermodynamic transfer
you notice how the energy of your body
extends out into the environment
towards a state of equilibrium.

In a universe, (almost) infinitely old,
the stars have cooled down completely
and have transferred all their heat
to the surrounding.

Imagine yourself a cloud
rising up into the night sky.
As the cloud spreads out
you fragment into a galaxy
a nebula, a star,
a planet.

Every atom of your body loses energy.
Even a supermassive black hole
created by the collapse of a supercluster of galaxies
evaporates over 10 to the power of 106 years.

But we have at least until that time.

You feel your muscles
completely letting go.
The cells of your body
released by the forces
that kept them together.
You are dissolving
into thin mist.
A molecule
in a vast ocean of particles
until nothing is left
but maximum entropy,
an infinite sea of noise.