Tidal Variations is a video installation initiated by Taiwanese artist and filmmaker SU Yu-Hsin and her collaboration with Australian dancer and choreographer Angela GOH, and co-commissioned by the Sydney Opera House and Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab. The artists dig into the history of the site, re-imagining it—as a speculative data center drifting on water where undersea cables converge, and a screen-like surface that reflects water and light. Under COVID-19, the windows became a symbol of enclosure and isolation. People looked out the window to the street, and also encountered one another as digital framed images. The artists examine Glass Walls and the engineering structure of the Sydney Opera House to map the Internet infrastructure and optical fiber network: the data light crosses the bottom of the sea and reaches the path of people’s glass screens. They attempt to think from the perspective of material imagination in a way to approach isolation and intimacy during the epidemic. Undersea cables construct watery conduits from node to node, frame to frame, window to window. It’s a global system that never sleeps, and information behind the black screen continues flowing. Water and light, the two substances that enabled life to evolve in the first place, now enable the contemporary technological entanglement upon which we have come to rely. The tide in people’s bodies is highly connected with the data light behind the screen. Tidal Variations renders and reveals the image, the body, data, and thinking as water and light, reframing the world through a wet mechanics of seeing.