Gray Area Grand Theater: Tidal Transmissions: Navigation CROSSLUCID with Sayaka Botanic

Tidal Transmissions: Navigation is a live audiovisual work by CROSSLUCID, centered on T I D E (Tidal Intelligence Data Engine) — a self-evolving ecosystem of AI entities that process real-time oceanic data and adapt how they communicate in response to changing conditions.

Drawing on Indigenous Pacific navigation practices, particularly Marshallese stick charts that map wave interference patterns, the work reimagines orientation not as a fixed position, but as a dynamic relationship between forces. In this framework, signals emerge from apparent noise, and cognition is distributed rather than contained.

Featuring a live performance by experimental violinist Sayaka Botanic, who instrumentalizes her body as the substrate of oceanic data, her bow tracing the logic of Pacific stick charts through sound, enacting an embodied wayfinding between ancient piloting traditions and tidal data streams.

Following the performance, Claire Isabel Webb joins Sylwana Zybura and Tomas C. Toth from CROSSLUCID and Sayaka Botanic for a panel discussion.

This event is presented by Future Humans, a research initiative housed in the Berggruen Institute that examines how ideas of life, intelligence, and consciousness are being reshaped in the twenty-first century.