THE RISING TIDE

2025

Location: 
Thames Estuary · Allhallows · Kent · England

Audiovisual: 9 mins
Ritual: 30 mins

The Rising Tide is a 9-minute live, site-responsive audiovisual performance developed within the Thames Estuary.
I perform the visuals (live control of a cyanotype-based animation and its parameters) while Nick Balchin (aka DeCay Surgery) performs the audio through live electronics and transformed field recordings. A responsive audiovisual system functions as a third performer: audio-reactive mappings and rule-based processes modulate the image in real time, introducing datamosh-like glitches and controlled image corruption beyond our direct interventions.

The visual score is built from digital footage printed frame-by-frame and transformed into cyanotypes, then toned with local intertidal vegetation to produce three chromatic sets corresponding to low, mid, and high tide. Reassembled as stop-motion, these sequences operate as indexical traces of site and process. Because the system is live and reactive, outcomes are non-repeatable: each presentation renders a distinct audio–visual result, aligning performance with a landscape understood as ongoing transformation.

Situated in an area officially at risk of flooding, the work treats the Thames as conceptual focus and material driver. Within this context, glitches serve as visual markers of anthropogenic disturbance, making legible the fragility of interdependent ecological systems. A final image records a moon jellyfish that drifted onto sensitised paper during an in-situ cyanotype, underscoring multispecies presence and tidal temporality. The collaboration therefore spans human performers (audio/visual), software as co-agent, and the tidal environment.

Pre-show: a 30-minute participatory tide ritual invites breathwork and attentive listening (after Pauline Oliveros), using estuarine materials to establish a situated mode of reception for the performance.