THE RISING TIDE

2025

Location: 
Thames Estuary · Allhallows · Kent · England

Audiovisual: 9 mins
Ritual: 30 mins

The Rising Tide is a 9-minute site-responsive audiovisual performance exploring the entangled dynamics of ecological transformation in the Thames Estuary.

The piece was developed through a more-than-human collaboration involving the tidal landscape, electronic musician Nick Balchin (aka DC Surgery), and responsive software systems.

The visual component derives from digital footage printed frame by frame and transformed into cyanotypes. These were toned with local intertidal vegetation so that each one of the three chromatic variations corresponds to a tidal phase: low, medium, and high tide. Reassembled into stop-motion animation, the sequences carry the indexical trace of site and process. In performance, audio-reactive software links sound and image, with tidal fragments triggering shifts in the animation to generate glitch aesthetics that unfold in real time.

The choice of the Thames as site is grounded in lived proximity: I am based in an area officially classified by the Environment Agency as at risk of flooding. This condition of latent vulnerability positions the Thames as both a conceptual focus and a material and affective point of departure, articulating the entanglement of place, precarity, and embodied experience.

The resulting visual disruptions function as metaphorical ruptures, indexing the human-made fractures imposed on ecological systems. Glitches appear as symbolic scars, revealing the fragility of environmental networks increasingly destabilised by anthropogenic impact.

The final scene reveals a moon jellyfish that drifted onto the sensitised paper as I made a cyanotype directly in the river. Long associated with a strange, almost timeless survival, the jellyfish becomes a herald of another future, one in which life continues without humans, enduring as a silent witness to the rising waters.

Through this collaboration across species, media, and technologies, The Rising Tide invites a sensorial engagement with tidal temporality and multispecies presence, recognising the River Thames as a co-author.

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The performance is preceded by a 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.