Seascape is a new body of work by British artist Susan Collins combining digital technologies with the classical traditions of English landscape painting. The project presents a visual exploration into the natural cycles of tide, time and light across the South East coast of England.

Seascape features a series of gradually unfolding digital seascapes created using imagery captured in real time by webcams installed at five key vantage points along the south coast between Margate and Portsmouth. The cameras are positioned at various seafront locations in Margate, Folkstone, Bexhill, Pagham, and Stokes Bay.

Sited at each location for up to a year and remaining live until summer 2009, these webcams transmit and archive the seascape images in real time. Each image is constructed a pixel at a time, from top to bottom and left to right of the image, in horizontal bands continuously. A whole image is made from individual pixels collected over a six and a half hour period, approximately the time it takes for the tide to come in or out. The horizon is framed in each location, forming a fragment of the continuous panorama of the South East coast, where sea and sky combine with stray pixels revealing other presences such as passing ships, yachts, people, birds and windsurfers.

The Seascape website presents live webcam imagery transmitted and archived at each location every five minutes. With the ability to scroll backwards (and forwards) in time. It also presents the vast archive of webcam imagery amassed over the period of a year at each of the five coastal locations and the opportunity to download a full screen version of Seascape which can be viewed online for the duration of the live feeds.

Seascape exists as both website and an exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea. A Seascape publication has also been produced to coincide with the exhibition featuring essays by Sean Cubitt and Nicholas Alfrey, published by Film and Video Umbrella.

Seascape was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and the De La Warr Pavilion and supported by Arts Council England and the Art and Humanities Research Council.