Fenlandia
Fenlandia is a series of gradually unfolding, romantic landscapes harvested and archived over the course of the year by a webcam placed in Silicon Fen, an area in rural England where technology is embedded in the flat horizons of the reclaimed landscape in canals, sluices, dykes, and ditches. The webcam is programmed to record images at the rate of one pixel per second, resulting in slowly constructed images that encode the landscape over time.
For 12 months from May 2004, a webcam was placed on the roof of the Anchor Inn, a 17th century coaching inn in the heart of rural England, part of an area known as Silicon Fen overlooking the Great Ouse and the New Bedford River at Sutton Gault in Cambridgeshire, an area where technology is literally embedded in the flat horizons of a reclaimed landscape of canals, sluices, dykes and ditches.
The webcam was programmed to record images a pixel a second, so that a whole image would be made up of individual pixels collected over 21.33 hours. Each image was collected from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal bands continuously.
The result is Fenlandia, a series of gradually unfolding, classically romantic landscape images harvested and archived over the course of the year.
The work is intended to be slow, a reflection on the ever increasing speeds we demand from the internet. It encodes the landscape over time, with different tonal horizontal bands recording fluctuations in light and movement throughout the day and with broad bands of black depicting nighttime. Stray pixels appear in the image where a bird, person, car or other unidentifiable object may have passed in front of the webcam as the pixel was captured.
Time becomes intrinsic to the work as the previous 76800 seconds or 21.33 hours - just under a day - is displayed pixel by pixel within a continuously updating time lapse film caught in a single frame. Poised between the still and the moving image, the lens and the pixel, the work explores how images can be coded and decoded using both light and time as building blocks for the work.
Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Norwich School of Art for an online project, Silicon Fen (book forthcoming 2007), Fenlandia exists concurrently as a website; a networked full screen live transmission, and as a series of archival digital inkjet prints from the archive.
Exhibitions include: Rhizome ArtBase 101; The Microwave Media Festival, Hong Kong; Digital Aesthetic 2, Harris Gallery, Preston; Video Vortex. media Art Institute, Amsterdam and a solo exhibition at Babylon Gallery, Ely, Cambridgeshire.
For 12 months from May 2004, a webcamera has been placed on a roof of a 17th century coaching inn in the heart of rural Cambridgeshire, part of an area known as Silicon Fen.
The webcam has been programmed to record images pixel by pixel. Currently it is set to record a pixel a second, so that a whole image is made up of individual pixels collected over 21.33 hours. Each image is collected from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal bands continuously.
The work is meant to be slow, a reflection on the ever increasing speeds we demand from the internet. It encodes the landscape over time, recording fluctuations in light and movement throughout the day (and night).
Regularly updated stills can be viewed in the site's archive, whilst a downloadable (flash) application lets the work function as a distributable artwork which can be viewed full screen and updated live to your computer in real time.