A.S.T.

Intertidal

The term Intertidal refers to the coastal zone that lies above water at low tide and below water at high tide. It is the liminal contemporary condition that is characteristic of coastal cities around the globe. The video presents a voice from a future already subsumed by the tides, trying to transmit a message through to our present. ‘How do we let them know we are drowning?’ we are asked, via an overload of sound and image flashing through multiple futures, all in urgent need of care and attention.

The work is about communication and time. It begins with a diagram from American mathematician Claude Shannon (father of information theory) that sets out the basic elements of communication. It breaks down the idea of communication into its most basic parts, what is needed, how it happens. He includes noise as an essential part of of any communion system.

We realized one is always communicating with the future, anything you do in the present is a potential communication with the future however there is an urgency now for the future to communicate with us, in the now. There is a need to know the demands of climate change and how best to mitigate them, so the question of how to communicate with the past becomes essential. We wanted to run Shannon’s communication system in reverse as a way to think about communicating with the past.

The video suggest that this communication might be possible via noise, that there might be information in noise about the future that we can access in the now. The example of Atlantis is given; that it is not a story from our past but a memory of our future. this is given as an example where we interpreted information coming through the noise incorrectly, the real story is not a myth about an ancient submerged city but a memory of our collective future the includes submerged cities around the globe.