Louie Levison

About

Tidal Room

The way in which we experience our physical environment is increasingly affected by digital representation. From cinema to social media, we embrace the digital more and reality less.

When a hybrid reality, that exists between the physical and digital is created, this leads to new experiences. Experiences that help us to redefine the relationship between the two.

Tidal Room stages the River Thames as the main actor in the riparian zone of its tidal landscape. Three bodies of water are staged in three different states of materiality navigating in between the physically real and the digitally represented.

Co-existence of physical and digital space within the riparian zone of the Thames

Tidal landscapes are controlled by technology and infrastructure. River walls keep the Thames within certain parameters, storm drains control the amount of water flowing into the Thames and the Thames barrier limits the heights that spring tides can reach. In the moment of tidal fluctuation none of this is immediately apparent to us, as city dwellers.

The Thames is the theatre where industry and nature perform their roles within the urban ecology. As the global condition worsens it will be here where the city is hit first, when the human technological defences can no longer keep pace with the worsening of the crisis, the tide will consume the city.

Tidal Room merges the physical reality of the Thames with its digital reproduction, a space that confronts the Londoner with this reality. The paradox of the unnatural natural environment. Connecting the urban population to this nature within the city that is currently overlooked.

Projection and digital technology start to redefine the natural elements and how we experience it. Not just through representation, but by actually creating a new space, layering projected image and physical matter. A co-existence of reality and its live captured and projected image to connect micro ecologies with tidal actors to challenge the separation of digital perception of nature and our physical experience of it.

Triptych 4k digital video.

Audiovisual architecture is having an increasing impact on the built environment. The technology is advancing faster than our social understanding. Projection mapping can be used to entirely reshape architectural facades and is often used in light shows at a city-wide scale. My Projection Installations aim to go further than simply being an aesthetic light show, asking the question of how this methodology can be pushed further to highlight architectural contexts and create physical and digital space.

The resulting installation is a triptych video work that takes place in three key locations within the semi-aquatic tidal zone at Blackwall Point. Each has a unique micro-topography formed by the tidal fluctuations. The edge of the Thames itself at a mid-tide state, a tidal pool left behind by the Thames and the pebble beach furthest from the water’s edge.

Space is produced through a signature methodology which implies live filming and simultaneous projection. These exist as three separate states of water. The volatile tidal actor itself, the semi-static pool and the drained, exposed stones of the beach. Three states of materiality are then imposed on these sites by the interaction of the physical matter with the live projected image, ranging from physical to ambiguous to virtual.

The live captured motion of the tide is connected to its geographical product via spatial projection. The result is a triple framed output which speaks to the increasing coincidence of reality and its representation within our living environment.  The field of view of the input camera, the cone of light generated by the projector and the frame of the recording camera to create the cinematic space and a fundamentally new cinematic experience of reality and nature.