From, maybe To: Prelude is a 3D-animated audiovisual short film that serves as an introduction to the broader project From, maybe To. It explores memory as a transformative force through the fictional reimagining of a single object: the piano. Initially presented as a photogrammetric model, the piano suddenly explodes, triggering a visual and conceptual journey into a fragmented dimension beyond time and space. What once appeared as a familiar musical instrument dissolves into a constellation of floating fragments, components that no longer serve their original function, but are reassembled by an unknown intelligence. This reconstruction does not aim to restore unity, but gives rise to a speculative, mutable, hybrid entity.

The piano thus becomes a metaphorical architectural machine for storing human memories. The work moves fluidly between visible and invisible realms, questioning the boundaries between inside and outside, perception and reality. These binaries collapse into a multidimensional space where the present is both presence and memory, and time unfolds not as a line but as a web of interconnected experiences. Echoing Plato’s allegory of the cave, Prelude invites the viewer to look beyond shadows, to perceive the fractured nature of reality as a space of potential rather than loss. In this speculative terrain, the loss of spatial coordinates becomes a generative condition. The object ceases to be what it was, and in that rupture, a new possibility emerges: not to reconstruct the identical, but to inhabit the fracture as a shared, dynamic threshold. The video concludes with the implosion of the piano, collapsing into a single line.

This final gesture, rather than marking an end, evokes a moment of infinite potential, a condensation of countless points. Here, pressure transforms rather than destroys, and presence becomes a form of resistance. The same conceptual process is applied to sound. The narrative imagines the piano’s voice as something unfamiliar, lost to memory. It is as if someone had found an old tape containing recordings but could only analyze it as raw digital data. Throughout the film, the piano’s sound is gradually reconstructed, emerging from noise into harmony, only to dissolve again, this time into the mechanical noises of the instrument itself. This sonic shift mirrors the fluidity between interior and exterior, reinforcing the collapse of boundaries explored in the visual dimension. Techniques such as convolution were employed to reconstruct the piano’s sound through the blending of its harmonic and noise components, generating a hybrid timbre that gestures toward the original but never fully reveals itself. This ambiguous voice becomes a further layer of the piano’s speculative transformation. Instead, the recovered fragments are processed into short, looping sequences that generate new harmonies through variations in playback speed. At the moment of the piano’s implosion, the audio undergoes a drastic transformation, replaying the sonic journey in a stretched and pitched-down form.