Tidal

City of Sydney

Light Installation & Data Visualisation

Silhouetted adult and child standing in front of a pink light installation in a shopfront at night.

“The work engages our senses and - importantly - our minds, and prompts us to consider what we can do as individuals and as cities and communities to ensure a future for all.”

Lord Mayor Clover Moore

TIDAL is a data visualisation of concurrent tides in Sydney and its coastal sister cities: Nagoya, Guangzhou, Portsmouth, San Francisco and Wellington. The visualised tidal data is of the future - forecasts of the year 2050. Oscillating at 5000 times normal speed and 1:1 scale, the 12 months of data is compressed into 1 hour & 45 minutes. Each ebb and flow becomes a calm breath in and out.

We have long been able to predict the Earth’s tides decades into the future, accurate to the second and the centimetre. However, global warming, the dredging of river channels and the filling in of coastal wetlands are altering tidal movements that have long been considered stable.

With this in mind, the tidal data is less a prediction of the future than a nostalgic artefact of a time when the world seemed more stable - when the predicting of tides depended exclusively on celestial forces far beyond our control. The data ceases to be an object of the future, and instead becomes one of the past.

Nevertheless, these graceful sine wave motions of colour hovering within the city serve as a reminder – although we are anxious about the future, our oceans will continue to rise and fall as they have for millennia, regardless of whether we are here to see them.

The artwork, consisting of horizontal strips of light in a shop front window, can be seen in the dark street.
A shopfront window on a street at night, filled with horizontal strips of light.
A black under-awning sign on a street at night in front of the light installation artwork. Text on the sign reads: TIDAL, Mike Daly, Art & About, City of Sydney.
A man stands in front of the light installation artwork at night, illuminated by blue light.
A car driving and a woman walking pass by the light installation artwork.
A close-up of the under-awning sign depicting the height of the tide in meters on an alphanumeric display. The tide reads 2.75 meters.
A black under-awning sign on a street at night in front of the light installation artwork. Text on the sign reads: Time 23:53, Date 27/02/2050, City SF USA, Tide 2.39 M.
A young woman stands in front of the artwork, looking up at it.
Horizontal pink and white illuminated light strips in a shop-front window in an empty street a night.