A 200 km walk across Belgium as part of Sideways Festival 2012. 13 collaboratively devised performances with the artist Eleanor Wynne Davis live streamed to a global audience using bepsoke software from a series of fields across Belgium.
It was very hot.
I subsequently published the following paper with the artists Dr. Rebecca Birch and Dr. Rob Smith in Digital Creativity, a special issue on Arts & Ecology in 2015.
Field Broadcast is an artist-run live broadcast project, commissioning artists to work with live broadcast as a medium, using our bespoke software. The Field Broadcast software delivers live broadcasts direct to the viewer’s desktops outside of a web browser. Times of the broadcasts are not announced, offering the potential for audience members to encounter live broadcast artworks as unexpected interruptions to other activities. The broadcasts are not transmissions of live events that also take place offline1, they are artworks devised specifically for broadcast, live events that occur at the point of reception, rather than at the site of transmission. Each viewer receives a slightly different version of the work, depending upon their specific surroundings. To explain how the software of Field Broadcast works, it is easier to begin with a story. A story told from the point of view of Ana, an imaginary Field Broadcast viewer:
Ana is sitting at her desk. It faces the wall. A window is to her right. Focused on the laptop screen she maintains a consistent awareness of the presence of the window, aligned directly with an ignorance of the events outside of it. In the corner of her laptop screen a dormant black circle displays the words ‘NOT LIVE’. (She isn’t really sure what this circle will do, but her friend, an artist involved in the project sent her the link to download the software and assures her that it ‘will be good’).
She is writing an invoice, adding up several receipts for replacement batteries, taxi fares and cables and trying to remember purchases she may have forgotten. It’s 8.47 pm, but she is not aware of this, and isn’t intending on moving, a cooling cup of coffee beside her and a long evening of admin ahead.
A ping.