Before there was Pursuit of Equilibrium, there was a single night.
First Contact is the prologue to this entire series, a set of six photographs captured during the first attempt to test an idea. The question was simple: can the motion of a pendulum be captured using light inside a dark room?
I didn't have much of a plan or future roadmap, just an undeniable curiosity and the need to see if it was even possible.
The setup was assembled quickly from whatever was available. A flashlight suspended from fishing line, pinned into the ceiling with a thumbtack. Aluminum foil wrapped around the light, with a small puncture to restrict the beam. And my trusty camera placed on the ground, facing upward.
By chance, the darkest room in the house was my baby's room at the time, thanks to blackout curtains that blocked nearly all ambient light.
Nothing about the system was controlled. The pendulum twisted as it swung, introducing rotation that couldn't be stabilized. The light shifted unpredictably as the makeshift aperture rotated. Brightness changed depending on angle, position, and movement. Every variable that would later be engineered into the system was, at this point, left to chance.
The goal was simply to try it.
When the first exposures came through, everything changed.
What appeared in the images wasn't random. Structure was there. Patterns were forming. The motion was translating into something coherent, something that felt far more precise than the system that produced it.
There was a moment of recognition in seeing those results, a realization that the idea worked, and that I just opened something much deeper than the initial question. What started as a quick experiment immediately became something I knew I had to pursue, something that would require time, iteration, and complete focus.
These six works come from that first night.
They carry the instability of the system that created them, the rotation, the inconsistencies in light, the imperfections in the setup. Those same conditions make them impossible to reproduce. The system was never built this way again, and the behavior that produced these images cannot be matched.
They mark the beginning of Pursuit of Equilibrium.
Everything that followed, Lux, the refinement of the rig, and eventually the transition into simulation for Pendulums, traces back to this moment.