This sequence will serve to bring together ideas of random 'noise' and consciousness. The same medium (radio) that can give us an experience of human communication  – the illusion of the presence of another conscious speaking being – also gives us noise; the conversion into sound of the phenomenon of random bits of electromagnetic energy moving through the cosmos. This too has meaning, if we only knew it; reporting on the activities of stars, the composition of materials, and so on. It's a matter of tuning-in.

But who is doing the tuning? And to what?

Again, this page is part of a sequence dealing with the possibility of messages being 'swallowed', ie absorbed, deviated, lost to entropy, or whatever. We'll come across it in a diferent form in pages following.

A continuation from the previos page. The traveller might not make it all the way to its destination; the broadcast may not be received.

This page takes the broadcast out of the studio and into the atmosphere.

The idea of the wave being 'swallowed by birds' which will occur over the next couple of pages conflates the idea of the wave with the insect (the lacewing I have noted earlier): the 'insignificant traveller' may not make it to its destination. It may be 'swallowed by birds' or blotted out, absorbed, destroyed or perhaps 'liberated from being', by many possibilities along the way.

A room with a microphone. A solid wave reaches towards the mike and indicates the speaker's presence, or at any rate the echoes of their presence that 'bounce around' and make their way to us. Perhaps we persist on such 'echoes of presence'? At any rate, whatever seems to us immediate and real must be based on them.

This is the first page that forms the 'quanta' of dots into a wave form. It comes at a point (see previous post) where the Radio evokes the presence of the universe as a real place, as a place that can seem both distant and present, right there behind the speaker grille.

Amongst the chaos (the scribbled spirals and 'zips' of random passages and collisions in the 'cloud chamber' in the background of the image) the clear pattern of a wave stands out, and we can fasten our attention on it. Our image of presence fastens on to the coherence of something that is, in itself perhaps illusory, a wave built out of the happenstance qualities of the universe.

Part of a pair of pages discussing the phrase 'What lies in the darkness/ behind the speaker grille?'

We're supposed to be listening to the radio, to the hiss of static that is the sound of the stars, and to the occasional burst of speech or music that's been transmitted more locally (though it, too is on its way out into the cosmos). We can intercept these insignificant travellers by turning our needle to their frequencies; and there they are. They seem present. (One version of this thought goes, 'Is there a tiny band inside the radio?') The seeming presence is the messenger of the existence of others, and of other places and times. The sound of static is itself the sound of time: most of it has travelled a long way to get to you, here, now.

The narrator asks us to 'turn' ourselves, slowly. Hidden in the scattered lines that illuminate the page is the image of an insect's wing.

The lacewing is a shortlived insect that I have used as an image of the 'insignificant traveller'. Something negligible, whose journey nevertheless has its role in things, and which (like in the famous 'butterfly effect') can have consequences for larger scales of event. The evanescent, filament thin touch of human contact can seem so insignificant, but can mean worlds.

Blink, and you may miss it.

Again, the 'fetching up' might have suited a 'ship/message in a bottle' motif well.

Here the green line forms a spiral, moving towards some sort of luminosity.

I wanted to connote an orbital path, but also the 'spiral' of pilgrimage. There is, as always, though, the possibility of the uncoiling spiral of creativity. Tuning the radio, or searching through our consciousness, fetches us up mostly incoherent noise: but sometimes the unexpected can come through.

I wanted to pull away from the strict visual metaphor of the tuning dial now and used the narrator's choice of words as a prompt; the 'oddysey' through the space (on the dial, through the universe, through experience) literally conjures a ship for our voyage.

In retrospect, this seems a little random in context. I think that there is nothing particularly wrong with the ship image, but it doesn't persist for long enough to establish itself. I think that a more potent form of the same idea would have been to use a 'ship in a bottle' motif. This would have connoted message-carrying meaning to the ship, and reinforced its twin significance/insignificane. I could have also, with a substitution of thread for rigging, managed a correspondence to the 'needle' metaphor that is established in the 'tuning dial' section. The needle is oupr pilot and will tune the dial, trim our 'thread' rigging, and be the focal direction of our consciousness all at once.

Anyway, I lost out on that opportunity. But who knows what the rest might have been like with it?