Scene on a Navigable River
Date uploaded: June 23, 2014
Constable’s famous pastoral landscapes of rolling farmland, rivers and meadows are the setting for Scene on a Navigable River, a series of new live broadcast artworks, commissioned by Field Broadcast a live digital broadcasting platform led by artists Rebecca Birch and Rob Smith. New live artworks will be broadcast instantaneously to computers, tablets & mobile phones from the 9th to the 15th of July 2014.
After downloading a special Field Broadcast app, the software waits quietly until the artist’s work is ready for transmission, when a live video stream opens unannounced on the recipient’s computer, tablet or mobile phone desktop.
Field Broadcast have commissioned eight artists to create new works for broadcast from Dedham Vale, location of many of Constable’s paintings including The Hay Wain and Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River). Lying somewhere between the real and the imagined in the carefully conserved ‘heritage landscape’ of Flatford Mill and the surrounding area, Scene from a Navigable River forms a fragmented topology of an iconic landscape, exploring both the physical setting and its representation through the personal realm of apps, screensavers and gifs.
For seven days in July, new one-off artworks from artists Adam Chodzko & Gretchen Egolf, Beth Collar, Florence Peake, Ben Judd, Paul Becker & Francesco Pedraglio, Way Through, Rory Macbeth and Ian Whittlesea interrupt everyday activities in offices, homes, trains and cafes across the globe delivering impromptu escapes into other worlds. Some take elements directly from The Hay Wain as their starting point – it’s characters, cloudscapes or colours; whilst others draw on a geographical feature – the River Stour, the wider landscape and its hidden narratives, or its contemporary presentation. Armed with laptops, video cameras and a 3G internet connection, the artists broadcast their works direct from this historical English Romantic landscape without any editing or post production.
Field Broadcast was created in 2010 by Rebecca Birch and Rob Smith to commission new artworks exploring the relationship between the artist and the landscape in a single event that can only be seen via live digital broadcast. Each individual experience of the broadcast is unique, a montage of the Field Broadcast window with the personal clutter of a computer desktop: emails, chat windows, web browsers, wallpaper. Field Broadcast have commissioned projects using animation, text, performances, sculpture and live data from artists including Ed Atkins, Erica Scourti, Susan Collins, Patrick Coyle, Simon Faithfull, Matthew Tickle and Sarah Tripp.
To receive Scene on a Navigable River, download the app by clicking here.
Funded by Arts Concil England through Grants for the Arts and Essex County Council, and supported by the National Trust.
For further information, interviews and images, please contact Janette Scott Arts PR on [email protected] or +44(0)7966 486156.
