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...