Unfolding Time: Landscapes, Seascapes and the Aesthetics of Transmission

Susan Collins

From spring 2008 to summer 2009, network cameras were installed at five locations along the south-east coast of England from Margate to Gosport. Each camera looked out over the English Channel, framing the horizon and forming part of the panoramic series, Seascape. Transmitting and archiving in real time, each Seascape image was constructed pixel by pixel in horizontal bands continuously from top to bottom and left to right. Each complete image was collected over just under seven hours, recording the fluctuations in light and movement, time and tide throughout day and night.

Seascape (2008–09) built upon previous works Fenlandia (2004–05) and Glenlandia (2005–07) which explored the relationship between landscape and technological innovation in the areas known as Silicon Fen in Cambridgeshire and Silicon Glen in Scotland through a series of gradually unfolding, classically romantic landscape images that were harvested and archived over a number of years. Seascape extended the investigation to a less obviously picturesque and more abstracted depiction of time and tide.

This chapter will reflect on all three works: Fenlandia,Glenlandia and Seascape. It will explore issues raised by the works including the relationship between landscape and time; abstraction and representation; the aesthetics of transmission, and the moment of 'right now' in the work.

Time and transmission

This series of works found its origins in 2002 when I was developing the work, Transporting Skies (http://www.susan-collins.net/2002/transporting-skies), which relayed a live video image of sky between the two locations of Site Gallery in Sheffield, Yorkshire and Newlyn Art Gallery in Cornwall. The transmitted skies were projected on a large scale according to the architecture of each gallery, with each sky projection effectively providing a remote light source for the alternate location. The exhibition took place in November when the days in northern Sheffield were noticeably shorter than in Newlyn on the south-west coast, so that the projection of the Cornish sky at Site Gallery would show daylight for some time after it had grown dark outside. At twilight, the transmission process became more apparent, with the pixelated compressed digitization of the streamed sky taking on a certain abstract, painterly, Klimt-like visual quality. Parts of the images buffered and lingered, creating an almost liquid effect on the staggered, streamed image. The darkness took on distinct qualities for each location: in urban Sheffield, the light pollution gave a permanently reddish hue, whereas the night sky in rural Newlyn became unambiguously pitch black.

A second work also provided a live connection between the two galleries. Intended to locate the work more specifically to Sheffield and Newlyn, I was influenced by the fact that the first transatlantic Morse code message was transmitted by Marconi from Cornwall, and more pragmatically by the very little bandwidth I had left to play with after the live video exchange of sky. I wondered how I might transmit images or information live in real time between the two places in a way that used only the very smallest amount of data, initially exploring the possibility of transmitting an image by Morse code. I speculated on how long it would take and what it might look like, and it is this that led to the development of my first pixel-landscape work, employing the pixel as the unit of transmission, instead of a dot or dash.

Using basic desktop webcams, images were transmitted between the two locations via the internet. A program updated the images a pixel every second, starting in the top left-hand corner of the screen and writing horizontally, like text on a page until reaching the bottom right-hand corner, when it would start again, writing over the previous image, continuously. The images were a low resolution of 320 × 240, so that at the rate of a pixel a second, a whole image was made up of individual pixels collected over 76,800 seconds (or 21.33 hours), taking just less than a day to complete.

A pure experiment, it was hard to predict when installing the work how these images might actually look or what they might reveal. In constructing the image in this way over time, the permanent and the ephemeral become more apparent. The presence of a passing bird, person, car or other object for instance, appeared as stray pixels, miniscule interruptions in the image; whereas in Newlyn night time appeared as a strong band of black with only the lights of Penzance puncturing the darkness [fig. 2]. In both locations, the normally subtle fluctuations in light throughout the course of the day became immediately apparent in the banding effect that appears in the images.

In both these works, time and the network together contributed to both the fabric and unfolding of the work.

Time and place

The following year, I was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella to make a piece of work in response to the area in East Anglia known as Silicon Fen. This is an area where in addition to the cluster of new and emerging technology companies (from which it gets its name), technology is literally embedded in the flat horizons, which evidence an earlier technological age, a reclaimed landscape of canals, sluices, dykes and ditches. This presented an opportunity to marry the horizontality of the pixel landscapes to their subject – the fens being very flat – and to develop the work further by creating an online version, whilst also archiving and harvesting images over the course of a full year.

A networked camera was installed on the roof of The Anchor Inn, a seventeenth century coaching inn in Sutton Gault, Cambridgeshire overlooking the New Bedford River in the heart of Silicon Fen. The resulting work, Fenlandia, was live online for 12 months from May 2004 to May 2005 [fig. 3].

The camera sent a continuous stream of images to a server in London through the Internet. Using the same technique as the previous experiment, a program then constructed images at the rate of a pixel a second from top to bottom of the screen in horizontal bands, continuously. As before, the images were low resolution, each taking 21.33 hours or just less than a day to 'complete'.

A further, Scottish 'sister' version, Glenlandia, named after Scotland's notional 'Silicon Glen' was live from the end of August 2005 for two years. Whereas Fenlandia recorded minute changes in the Fen landscape of eastern England, Glenlandia instead looked out over Loch Faskally, in Perthshire, Scotland – a place where technology is also implicitly embedded in the landscape.

Appearing to exemplify a quintessentially natural Scottish landscape, Loch Faskally is in fact man-made, constructed to service a hydroelectric dam in Pitlochry which in turn supplies all the power for the surrounding area. The water levels in the Loch rise and fall regularly (and sometimes dramatically) according to the level of demand for electricity in the neighbouring glens [fig. 4].

Both Fenlandia and Glenlandia existed in different forms: a 'live' version and a still version. The 'live' version consisted of a full-screen landscape image transmitting live in real time that was displayed as a gallery installation [fig. 5]. Viewers could also download display software from the project websites (http://www.susan-collins.net /fenlandia and http://www.susan-collins.net/glenlandia) so that they could view the landscape updating online in real time, pixel by pixel, full screen on any computer.

Images from both Fenlandia and Glenlandia were saved at 2 hour intervals creating a complete archive of just under 4000 and 8000 images, respectively. The 'still' manifestation of the works is derived from these archives and presented in the form of small and large-format digital prints. Both versions, the live and the still, have something distinct to offer. Colour, revealed by each individual pixel, is foregrounded in the prints. In general, the larger format prints serve to deconstruct the image, exposing the variations between each individual pixel: the black of night time that is made up of many blacks; pink or blue sunrises, and many kinds of yellow, orange, ochre and green in between. The smaller prints when lined up together in series expose a sense of duration, revealing a range of shifts and changes: from the thinning and widening band of black (night time) showing the lengthening and shortening days throughout the year, to the full moon that Glenlandia has occasionally captured and which appears as if a white comet streaking through the night sky but is in fact the moon slipping through the image over time [fig. 6].

I consider this work as a kind of 'open system:' one inhabited and activated by light, day, night, weather, movement of the sun, the moon, the seasons and all these analogue variables that conspire to produce an infinite variety of unique images.

Yet, there are also human interventions (beyond stray pixel appearances), which make themselves visible. On 20December 2004 in Fenlandia, the tree to the left of the image mysteriously disappeared from view. Initially, I thought the camera may have moved in strong winds; however, all the other landmarks were still in situ. I found out later that the tree had been chopped down because of subsidence and all the Fenlandia images produced thereafter have a bleaker, more abstract and less Arcadian feel to them [fig. 7].

Fenlandia and Glenlandia deliberately trade on the convention –or rather the perceived convention – of how a landscape image might historically have been composed and constructed. The landscape image is recorded absolutely as the camera sees it, and the results are read as a landscape, but because of the time shift the image is simultaneously both recognizable and unrecognizable.

Time and again

I was interested in developing further this potential for abstraction in the work, and I began looking at the seascape as a potential subject while artist in residence at Monash University in Melbourne in 2006; experimenting by constructing images from Australian 'surfcams' – the webcams set up on surfer beaches to let the surfers know when the surfing is good. Subsequently, I was invited to develop this still further with Film and Video Umbrella and the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, a modernist icon on the south-east coast of England whose long wall of picture windows looks directly out to sea. The result was Seascape (http://www.susan-collins.net/seascape): a panorama of live feeds constructing images slowly over time from five locations across the south-east coast of England over the course of a year.

Between March and October 2008, networked cameras were installed at different vantage points along the coast: at Margate, Folkestone, Bexhill-on-Sea, Pagham (near Bognor Regis) and Stokes Bay (near Gosport). In seeking the potential for abstraction, I set the view for each camera to frame the sea and sky with a common horizon line and largely evacuated landmark features from the images. Sea and sky often became interchangeable, creating false horizons through the horizontal construction of the image combined with fast changing light and weather conditions.

The individual characteristics of each location emerged over time. In Bexhill-on-Sea and Folkestone, the relationship between sea and shoreline remained virtually constant, whereas in Margate and Pagham underlying topographical features (seaweed and a sunken WW2 Mulberry, respectively) were repeatedly disclosed by the ebb and flow of the tide. Passing traffic was evident to a greater or lesser extent in each location. In Margate, lights from anchored ships were captured on the horizon at night time, whereas at Stokes Bay the evidence of numerous stray pixels testified to a busy waterway of passing ships, yachts, people and windsurfers [fig. 8].

Each image became a slice or section of the continuous panorama that is the south-east coast with each whole image made from individual pixels collected over just less than seven hours, approximately the time it takes for the tide to come in or go out.

For the exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion, five live projections showing the seascapes being constructed in real time were projected into the windows, against the backdrop of the actual, live coast itself [fig. 9].

A series of still images from the Seascape archive were exhibited as digital prints alongside the live projections to give a sense of not only the variations between the different locations, but the variations in the same location from month-to-month, day-to-day and even moment-to-moment.

The process of observation is distinct for the live and the still images. When looking at the live image there is an active engagement. The 'now' moment is constantly moving, it is in flux; a still image that is constantly changing. It could be seen effectively as a moving still, focusing on the 'now' moment, often mesmerizing with its slowness and this concentration on finding and then following one tiny moving pixel. In the moving still, the point of 'right now' shifts constantly through each image, whereas the prints, stills the 'right now' as the moment and the point at which that image is captured or archived. The prints become by contrast more contemplative; less concerned with seeking the moving pixel, they are ripe for decoding and recognizing the colour of each individual pixel as a distinct moment in time and space.

Whilst this process reveals some things such as the movement of the moon through the sky in Glenlandia, it misses others. For instance, in Seascape, the most violent lightning storm would appear as just a few stray pixels giving away little sense of a turbulent sea. A re- presentation of a familiar subject, it is reality but not as one normally witnesses it. Six or seven hours compresses into a single frame, time shifts, and while the source for the image may have come from a landscape or seascape, the image has the potential to become autonomous, something else, with the accrual of the image over time bringing its own set of artefacts and abstractions.

Time-lapsed images provide a unique opportunity to reveal those things that we may be aware of and yet happen too slowly for us to consciously observe. For all of these works, time becomes embedded as each image is slowly revealed within a continuously updating time-lapse film caught within a single frame. Poised between the still and the moving image, the lens and the pixel, these images become coded and decoded using light and time, rendering the familiar unfamiliar and potentially providing an opportunity to question, reframe and reinterpret our often routine relationship with the physical world.

Timespaces in the Debris of Globalization

Mike Crang

A good place to start this chapter is by thinking about particularly the Dimora works and how they fit in the overall arc of work that addresses displacement, globalization and so forth. What I think the Dimora series offers is pictures that are speaking to a space of globalization, a space of globality; and that they are speaking about migrant workers, the international labour economy and alongside that, they imply the ever more problematic international flows of capital and so on, that both drive, enable and are supported by those flows of people. They illustrate what Manuel Castells (1996) has called a world comprised of 'spaces of flows' rather than places. And I think it is interesting then to think how do we represent, depict or imagine that sort of spatiality because I think what Anne Tallentire's work gives is a very particular form of spatialization to try and think through that world in flow.