Cycles: Beginnings After Endings is an interactive narrative inspired by cosmological theories about how the universe might end and begin again. While modern physics often focuses on the Big Bang as the universe’s beginning, the question of how it will end is still unclear.
In this model, the end of the universe is simply another stage in the cycle of life, and is in many ways not much of an ending at all. Instead, I prefer to think of it as a transformation. The preceding universe creates that which forms the next: An infinite chain of universes and lives.
One possibility is the Big Bounce, a model in which the expansion of the universe eventually slows, stops, and then reverses. Gravity would pull galaxies, stars, and matter back together, collapsing everything into an extremely dense state until it rapidly explodes outwards into another Big Bang.
This project explores this model through the lens of Earth and our forests. We are taught early that life exists in a cycle. The seed sprouts into a sapling, and the sapling grows into a tree that lives, spreads its own seeds to form new trees, and eventually dies, fading into the ground as nutrients to be absorbed by others. The universe, from my point of view, operates similarly. The Big Bang, formed by the condensation of the previous universe, births a new one that lives and creates, and eventually condenses into a hot, dense state that will, in time, form a new universe.
Although many experts in the field reject this theory in view of Heat Death, where the universe slowly runs out of energy and becomes dim and empty but forever expanding, I cannot find it in myself to believe that when everything else lives and breathes through cycles—often interlocking amongst themselves, creating chains and chains of them—that the universe should be any different.