The 'radio-tuning' sequence continues, but I also include a photographic image of the sky, tinted with the colours of the spectrum.

I wanted to open up the imagery a little now, to hint that the 'tuning' wasn't just to the radio band, but all our sensory experiences and knowledge of the world. The contact in question is both mundane and, on a larger level, germane to the phenomena that makes the universe itself perceptible to us.

The 'radio-tuning' sequence continues…

The narration begins, and the meaning of the dots changes to another meaning of the word 'radio'. The narration tells us over the next few pages to 'turn the dial slowly' – we're now looking not at the night sky but at the waveband tuner of a radio, our point of focus, (our point of concentration or consciousness, if you like) fixed on the needle, concentrated into a narrow waveband that travels, searching, through the frequencies, through the stream of experience.

This just breaks down the progress towards the dots further, removing completely the landscape and making us cncentrate on them, their graphic potential and their possible meaning.

They are about to shift their meaning and their context, however…

We'll continue our journey towards the house as the book goes on, but the book draws us away from contact; our rendezvous with this presence or absence is not to happen yet. This image draws us back to the long journey of the dots across the sky. In a sense, this is an image that will drag us back to the problems of communication and insignificance I set up earlier.

These dots will turn out to be representations of radio waves as they travel through the cosmos: their meaning, if they have any, is the topic of radio astronomy, or in human terms, of communication. Radio thus means both the cosic and the personal, and these dots are their messenger. It is as often the case that they will depend on their context as their individual meanings however…

The same situation as preceding pages, although here the lighted window shape (there is no indication of the 'house' apart from this), idicates a human presence we are never shown. A lighted window means someone is home.

We're drawn, mothlike, towards this shape, towards the light that in its turn streams out in all directions including ours.

Our view draws back to put the previous image into a context of its own; the view we have been seeing is actually located in a landscape. We can still see the path we looked at previously.

The nighttime scene is intentionally stylised to create a sense of limitation, of graphic limitation within the scene. I might have achieved a more atmospheric or characterful feeling with more expressive means (like I did in books like Tiercel for example), but here I wanted instead to create a sense of contrast with some of the other material I would introduce as the book continued. Whether this was worth it or not I'm still unsure. I think that I could have made these scenes more expressive in a graphic, limited way, and kept the sense of controlled simplicity too, but these pages don't really exhaust that possibility.

The moon echoes the circumference given to the wave form on the previous page. Tracking across the moon, though, in a seemingly random path, is a line of dots in 'oscilloscope green' – the same green I've been using for the waveforms previously.

Here's the first appearance of the visual idea of 'dots as quanta'. The dots fom a line to us, despite their individuality. Contextual positioning relative to one another creates the sense of a line.

This page simply bounds the wave in a circle. The intention was simply to create an echo for the following page where the shape of the moon takes on the same circle.

I guess there is an implied movement across different scales in this: we could read the 'wave' as essentially small or insignificant, and the moon as big, physical and unmissable. But there is an implied identity to both, since their circumferences will match over these two pages. The idea of 'the insignificant' assuming importance because of its place on the universal scale is a theme of the book; aong with the notion that one never knows quite when circumstances will align.

Another part of the title page. I wanted the 'oscilloscope green' to declare itself as such, hence the image here. Once again the typeface shared the same colour.

The waveform is here now, and works with the word 'radio' to indicate that we are talking about radio as physics as well as radio in the sense of audio programming. We'll see the wave develop over the coming pages too.