Opening Reception: Saturday March 7th | 4pm–8pm
Artist’s Talk: Saturday March 7th | 6pm

TIDES is a new video and photographic installation and accompanying performances by media artist Ian Winters, exploring the rapidly changing tidelands of San Francisco Bay and the neighborhoods soon likely to be lost under rising waters. The gallery installation opens March 7th, 2020, and marks Winters’ return to the SFArtsED Gallery at Minnesota St Project (1275 Minnesota St.), following the success of his month-long 2018 installation, Summer, Winter, Spring.

Continuing Winters’ exploration of the intersection between video, contemporary music and performance, TIDES features a live video and contemporary music performance in the Minnesota Street Project Atrium on March 20th and 21st at 8pm. It features new combined video and music created by composers Brian Baumbusch (live performance) and Wayne Vitale (installation) along with video by Winters, and is performed by members of Lightbulb Ensemble and guest players including McKenzie Camp, Jennifer Ellis, Otis Harriel, Matt Ingalls, and Margaret Halbig.

The core of the TIDES project is a series of time-lapse films and still images created through 30+ days of walking the Bay’s tidelands, through neighborhoods and land below 5 meters in elevation. Rooted in the tradition of artist’s walks, expanded cinema and pilgrimage, the TIDES video installation bears witness to the scale of loss of our bay tide lands and the many human and natural communities along the 300+ miles of the Bay’s shoreline that will be below future tides because of climate change.

Informing both music and visual material are compositional patterns drawn from the range of scientific data about the Bay and its intersecting human-natural systems, such as NOAA oceanographic data, GIS models of tidal levels, species occurrences, as well as human factors. Much of the TIDES data was created by a unique collaboration with the citizen scientists of Oakland’s WHOLLY H20, gathering species data about Bay’s shoreline through BioBlitz events documented through the Cal Academy of Science’s iNaturalist app.

Bridging the worlds of abstract aesthetic creation, data science, and photo documentation, TIDES bears witness to the scale of loss of our bay tide lands, and captures the liminal space – industrial, natural, social – between the low tides of today
and the high tides to come.