Artist Ian Winters and the 12-member Lightbulb Ensemble collaborated with Wholly H20, an Oakland-based organization dedicated to sustainable, localized water management in California, to create Watershed Moments (a working title that changed to become TIDES: San Francisco Bay). Over decades of experience — including his career as Northern California Land Trust’s executive director — Ian Winters has challenged the boundaries of perception, environment, movement, and time-based media. In this project, he and his collaborators created a suite of new works that integrated photography, live media, new music composition, and scientific data. During the project’s development, Wholly H2O invited members of the public to become data-gathering citizen scientists, whose findings were featured in the finished piece.
TIDES: San Francisco Bay explored water’s complex qualities and characteristics from physical, aesthetic, ecological, and social perspectives. As part of the project’s data collection, Winters traversed and filmed the edge of the Bay’s shoreline. Performance venues in the San Francisco Bay Area included the SFArtsEd gallery in San Francisco. The finished work featured Winters’ live media that citizen scientists helped to gather data for; new music by composers from the Lightbulb Ensemble; and an ensemble of 12 composer-percussionists, playing on newly constructed and tuned instruments. Live performances related to the project were postponed due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus and closure of public venues in March 2020.