Fenlandia
Project description
Fenlandia is a networked digital artwork by British artist Susan Collins (b. 1964, London), exploring transmission, time, landscape and the relationship between physical environments and digital networks. Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Norwich School of Art for an online project and book, the work exists simultaneously as a website, a networked full-screen live transmission and a series of archival digital inkjet prints.
For Fenlandia, a webcam was installed for twelve months from May 2004 on the roof of the Anchor Inn, a seventeenth-century coaching inn in rural Cambridgeshire. The location overlooks the Great Ouse and the New Bedford River at Sutton Gault, within the area known as Silicon Fen, where technological development is embedded within a landscape of canals, sluices, dykes and ditches.
The webcam was programmed to record one pixel every second, meaning that a complete image was assembled from 76,800 individual pixels over 21.33 hours. Each image was constructed continuously from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal bands, transforming the passage of time into the fundamental structure of the image.
The resulting landscape images unfold gradually over the course of the year. Different tonal bands register changes in light and movement throughout the day, while broad areas of black record the hours of darkness. Occasional stray pixels register the presence of birds, people, cars and other unidentified movements passing in front of the camera at the precise moment a pixel is captured.
The deliberately slow process of transmission provides a counterpoint to the accelerating speeds associated with the internet. A previous period of 21.33 hours is compressed into a continuously updating time-lapse image, allowing the landscape to appear simultaneously as a still photograph and a moving image. Light and time become the primary materials through which the landscape is recorded, encoded and reconstructed.
Fenlandia forms part of Collins’s wider investigation into the relationship between time, place and networked transmission. Since 2002, she has developed a series of long-duration pixel-by-pixel internet transmissions from remote locations, including Seascape, LAND, Five Hours Later, And Current I and II and Dell Quay. These projects use digital networks to create sustained encounters between distant viewers and changing landscapes.
Through its combination of webcam technology, network transmission and durational observation, Fenlandia considers how digital systems can alter our perception of landscape and time. The work occupies a space between photography, moving image and live transmission, using the limitations of digital technology to create a contemplative record of an environment in constant change.
Bio
Susan Collins (b. 1964, London) is a British artist whose practice explores transmission, networks, time and landscape through the use of digital and electronic media. Recognised as a leading figure in the field of networked art in the UK, she has exhibited internationally and developed works that connect remote locations, digital technologies and public audiences.
Her public artworks include In Conversation (1997–2001), which connected internet users with pedestrians in Brighton, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Cardiff and Berlin; Underglow (2005–06), a network of illuminated drains commissioned by the Corporation of London; and Brighter Later (2013), a site-specific light installation for the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford driven by live weather data.
Collins’s work has received awards including a Royal Society for the Arts Art for Architecture award for her collaboration with architect Sarah Wigglesworth on A Classroom of the Future, a BAFTA nomination for her Tate commission Tate in Space, and the Society for Photographic Education Garry B. Fritz Imagemaker Award for Fenlandia and Glenlandia.
Collins is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, where she was the first female Slade Professor and Director from 2010 to 2018. She also served as Head of Research from 2019 to 2023 and established the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art (SCEMFA) in 1995.
Project details
Year: 2004–2005
Artist: Susan Collins
Work: Fenlandia
Year: 2004–2005
Commissioned by: Film and Video Umbrella; Norwich School of Art
Format: Website; networked full-screen live transmission; archival digital inkjet prints
Location: Sutton Gault, Cambridgeshire
Country: United Kingdom