INTERTIDAL RESONANCES

2025

Location: Thames Estuary · Allhallows · Kent · England

Intertidal Resonances is a 9-minute, site-responsive audiovisual performance that reimagines the tidal Thames as a more-than-human collaborator. This interdisciplinary work engages the river’s acoustic and visual ecologies through a sensorially immersive and technologically mediated lens, foregrounding its shifting materiality and tidal rhythms as active agents in the creative process.

Structured in three phases—low, mid, and high tide—the work mirrors the cyclical logic of the estuary, evoking a durational awareness of place and inviting reflection on impermanence, interdependence, and the porous boundaries between human and more-than-human worlds.

The performance is preceded by an intimate, participatory tide ritual. Drawing from somatic and acoustic practices inspired by Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations, the audience is invited into breathwork, imagined soundscapes, and symbolic gestures using estuarine materials. This shared act of attunement frames the Thames and its tidal rhythms within a numinous, cyclical cosmology, preparing participants to experience the performance as embodied, situated listeners within a living, responsive system.

What emerges is not a linear narrative, but a time-based encounter shaped by field recordings, live audio-reactive visuals, and environmental sound. The integration of glitch aesthetics—manifesting as digital distortions, feedback, and interference—fractures the landscape and functions as a set of ecopolitical markers. These glitches act as symbolic traces of anthropogenic disruption, mirroring how technological intervention often ruptures ecological networks before their complexity is fully understood. Rather than concealing such interference, the work embraces it—treating glitch as a language of instability, a sign of entanglement, and a visual echo of ecological fragility.

Conceived as an act of co-creation with the estuary, Intertidal Resonances resists mastery or control. It is a listening practice, a visual drift, and a call to acknowledge the agency of tidal time. In doing so, it contributes to a shift toward situated, entangled practices that foreground ecological presence as co-agent—redefining realism through a posthuman lens and inviting new ways of sensing and inhabiting a world in flux.