The Tide

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BACKGROUND Today there is a palpable sense that the world is on the brink of ecological, financial and political collapse - a fear that there are forces too large and obscure to confront which will decide our future. Timothy Morton (2011) theorises what he calls hyperobjects, which are so massively distributed in time and space that they defy the scale of human experience. He cites global warming and nuclear radiation - the stuff of our fears - as examples. 'They wouldn't fit in a landscape painting', he writes - 'they could never put you in the right mood'. Others have developed related concepts too - Michel Serres's (2011) 'world-objects' and Douglas Kahn's (2013) 'earth magnitude phenomena' to name a few. Morton further argues that we must address hyperobjects as we design for the future. CONTRIBUTION The Tide was a generative audiovisual installation that ran continuously for over six weeks, giving an experience of great scale, like that at which hyperobjects exist and over which we must now plan for the future. Featured in a glass display cabinet at the front of Counihan Gallery, it employed a short throw projector throwing onto an opaque acrylic sheet as well as surface transducers turning the surrounding glass into a speaker. The audio and video were both produced generatively using custom code, creating the effect of a tide of water rising and falling erratically but gradually within the gallery, communicating a process happening at vast spatial and durational scales, inhabited rather than experienced in full. SIGNIFICANCE The Tide was exhibited as part of the Current exhibition at Counihan Gallery in Brunswick, which was supported by Creative Victoria and ran from August 10 to September 17 2017. The exhibition was opened by Moreland Council member Mark Riley at an event attended by over 100 people. It was also supported by a program of public events, including an artist talk and performance from me to around 20 people.