Tides: A Personal Transition, A New Way of Seeing

Tides of Change: On Moving, Making, and the Quiet Wisdom of the Sea by

Kris Cirkuit

There’s a moment that comes with any big change—a kind of quiet pause, when you're neither where you were nor quite yet where you're going. "Tides" began in that moment.

For many years, I lived in Hackney, London. It wasn’t just a place I lived—it was part of who I was. The noise, the chaos, the shifting lines of gentrification, the constant presence of people and movement and tension. It shaped how I saw the world and how I made art. Hackney was like water to a fish: invisible, yet all-encompassing.

And then, everything changed.

During the COVID pandemic, the world slowed down in a way I hadn’t known was possible. At the time, I was studying for a master’s in Computational Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Though my studies continued online, the city itself fell still. No traffic, no chatter, no blur of movement. Just silence.

In that stillness, something shifted in me.

Leaving London

I realised I was ready to leave London. I had always known my surroundings shaped me, but I hadn’t realised just how deeply. When the city went quiet, I could finally hear myself again. And that voice was saying: it’s time.

I moved to Edinburgh. And it was everything I needed. A city that feels like it breathes—where hills meet skyline, and where the sea is never too far away. It offers both the thrum of city life and the calm of nature, and it quickly became home. But as grounding as the move was, it brought with it a question I hadn’t expected:

What now?

From Grit to Stillness

So much of my creative practice in London had revolved around the themes I was immersed in: class, precarity, change, noise. But in Edinburgh, that no longer made sense. I felt unmoored, uncertain. Without the stimulus of the familiar urban friction, I found myself asking: What do I make now?

So I walked. A lot. And I watched the sea.

It sounds simple, maybe even romantic. But it was practical. Walking gave me structure; the sea gave me comfort. The repetition of the waves, the changing light, the tides themselves—always shifting, always returning—became something of a meditation. Watching the sea helped me reflect on my own transition. The letting go. The arrival.

And that’s how Tides was born.

Generating the Work

The first version of Tides began as a generative video piece. I wanted to create something that echoed the ebb and flow I’d been witnessing. I started by sourcing real-world data—tide times and patterns—and mapping them to visual parameters in openFrameworks, a creative coding toolkit I often work with.

The output was a kind of visual rhythm: wave-like forms that slowly evolved over time. I built a generative system that mirrored the gentle, perpetual movement of the sea. The final video was reimagined and expanded for Sound Disposition, resulting in a 24-minute piece where each minute represents an hour in the tidal cycle. I composed an ambient soundscape to accompany the visuals, building it in Ableton Live, and the work premiered at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh.

This work, for me, represents not just the tides of the sea, but the tides of change within myself.

From Code to Print

What’s especially exciting for me is the way digital tools can bridge into physical form. As someone who works with code, one of the things I love about openFrameworks is the ability to draw to an FBO—a Frame Buffer Object. That might sound like a mouthful, but it’s really just a clever way of rendering visuals off-screen, in very high resolution, as though you're drawing to a much larger digital canvas.

This technique is essential in how I create my fine art prints.

Instead of being limited by the size of my screen, I can render my generative work at a much larger scale, then export it as a high-resolution .png file. From there, I bring it into photo editing software, resize it carefully, and prepare it for printing. This means I can preserve the fine details and subtle nuances that make the work what it is.

It also means I can offer something really flexible. If you like a particular piece but would prefer a different size, I can make that happen. I can even generate bespoke, one-off fine art prints—each one unique—directly from the source code. The potential is, quite literally, infinite.

And that feels right for this work. Just as the sea never repeats itself in quite the same way, neither do the images I create.

Sharing the Vision

Making art has always been about communication for me. Not in the sense of having a message to deliver, but in the quieter sense of offering something outwards. A moment. A mood. A kind of presence.

Tides was my way of navigating change, of processing a shift in place and perspective. It came out of a time of silence, and it's shaped by slowness, repetition, return. I’m grateful to have found new tools and new processes that allow me to share that journey—both digitally and physically.

Whether you're here because you're curious about the process, interested in computational art, or looking for fine art prints that carry a sense of quiet reflection—I’m glad you’ve found your way.

If you’re ever drawn to a particular piece and want to discuss custom sizing, bespoke outputs, or just want to know more about how the work was made, I’d love to hear from you. Each piece has a story. Sometimes personal, sometimes technical, sometimes just about the weather.

But always, in some way, about the tides.