Tidal Motion is an audio-visual installation built around a custom-designed listening chair. Audiences are seated with headphones and tactile transducers that deliver immersive soundscapes through the body, while projections of tidal change flow over them.
The work offers an immersive, embodied listening experience that draws attention to the planet’s ecological interconnectedness. The installation treats sound as a tangible material, felt as much as heard, and invites audiences to remain still long enough for their bodies to become part of the work itself.
Tidal Motion was selected as one of four new commissions through a national competitive process for Experimenta Emergence, Experimenta's 9th National Tour of Media Arts (2025-2027), curated by Lubi Thomas. Experimenta is Australia's leading organisation for commissioning, exhibiting and touring contemporary art at the intersection of art and technology, and Emergence presents thirteen works by leading Australian and international artists touring nationally with an accompanying public program. The project was supported by the Australian Government's Visions of Australia touring program and Creative Australia.
Research Background Art galleries remain predominantly visual spaces, where embodied and sensory attention is rarely built into the encounter with a work (Voegelin, 2010). Ecological art increasingly asks audiences to become immersed in more-than-human forces rather than observe them from a distance (Haraway, 2016), yet those forces are usually represented through image and sound received at a distance rather than felt through the body. This research asks: how can tactile sound, immersive projection and live environmental data be combined so that gallery audiences encounter more-than-human forces as embodied, multisensory immersion? Research Contribution Tidal Motion is an audio-visual installation built around a custom-designed listening chair: audiences are seated with headphones and tactile transducers that deliver soundscapes through the body, while projections of tidal change flow over them. Extending Barclay's 15-year practice in sound art, it introduces three contributions: (1) a seating and transducer design positioning the body as a site of composition, where sound is felt as much as heard; (2) a live streaming application connecting realtime tidal data to gallery installations, so the work is shaped continuously by the tide as it moves; and (3) a compositional method that retains the integrity of live tidal data while mixing four channels to remain sonically engaging. Together these establish a multisensory method for ecological sound art in which immersion is distributed across touch, hearing and vision, and the work's form is generated by a living environmental process rather than a fixed composition. Research Significance Tidal Motion was one of four new commissions selected through a national competitive process for Experimenta Emergence (2025-2027), Experimenta's 9th National Tour and International Triennial of Media Arts. Experimenta is Australia's leading organisation commissioning, exhibiting and touring contemporary art at the intersection of art and technology. Curated by Lubi Thomas, the exhibition presents 13 works by leading Australian and international artists, touring nationally with an accompanying public program, supported by the Australian Government's Visions of Australia and Creative Australia.