THE TIDES
For the audience The Tide Machine expresses in both performance and kinetics, simultaneously the fragility and terrific power of the tidal phenomenon. The orrery, tide-powered and working in real time, constitutes a direct mechanical link to the celestial movements which generate it.
The Tide Machine celebrates and illuminates these cosmic events on the terrestrial scale, gets down in the primordial mud with the cephalopods and reminds us how all life is interdependent, unimaginably diverse and ultimately beyond comprehension.
Within this context, an opportunity exists during residencies to engage with environmental groups in educational programmes on the subject of tides and the environment.
A pilot of this program was run in 2010 in Dumfries in collaboration with a secondary school, the school decided to run a creative program focussed on tides in parallel and inspired by our own investigations. The Crichton Carbon Centre assisted with environmental education and outreach sessions. The school and college groups also made site-visits to the Machine during development and rehearsal, and the artists delivered presentations about the project.
Tides are a compelling, fascinating and an awe-inspiring phenomenon, as any sailor will attest. As an energy-hungry civilization turns its attention to this great resource it is possible to forget what tides really are, how much of life depends on then, and how they affect us all.
The Tide Machine tour is a progressive, cumulative artwork composed of a mixture of residencies and performances.
A residency is envisaged as lasting at least one tidal cycle, a lunar month, during which local artists, performers, makers, engineers and writers will be invited to help modify existing mechanisms to operate in their location, develop new elements of the kinetics and the performance and contribute to the project as a whole. A literary element will be based on the collection of oral histories and is seen as an important part of each residency. An archive of testimony and of literary work inspired by The Tide Machine will be collected and fed into ideas for performance and kinetics pieces.
