entrevue
CONVERSATION WITH SUSAN COLLINS
Bio : Susan Collins (b. 1964 London) is one of the UK's leading artists working with digital media. For the past decade the collision between the real and the artificial or virtual has been a key area of investigation. Collins works across public, gallery and online spaces with works including In Conversation; Tate in Space, a Tate netart commission (nominated for a 2004 Bafta award); Transporting Skies which transported sky (and other phenomena) live between Penzance in Cornwall and Sheffield in Yorkshire; and Fenlandia, a twelve month pixel by pixel live internet transmission from the roof of a rural coaching inn in Cambridgeshire.
Projects currently transmitting live online include Glenlandia and The Spectrascope, a live pixel by pixel transmission from a haunted house.
Recently completed commissions include a wildlife surveillance system for Sarah Wigglesworth Architects's RIBA award winning Classroom of the Future, and Underglow, a network of illuminated drains for the Corporation of London for Light Up Queen Street.
Susan Collins has been Head of the Slade Centre for Electronic Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London since 1995. She completed a PhD on The role of the viewer in the realisation of In Conversation and other works in 2001.
Website: www.susan-collins.net
Carlo Zanni - Fenlandia is one of the most beautiful artworks I've ever seen.
Susan Collins - Thank you!
C. Z. - Especially I like its simple/minimal aesthetic that hides an astounding production process and an apparently effortless technique. Can you please briefly introduce it to us?
S. C. - Fenlandia was a collision of a number of thoughts and processes. Firstly it came out of another work altogether. I was making the work Transporting Skies (2002), which - quite literally - was transporting the sky, swapping it (and re-projecting it) between Newlyn Art Gallery in Cornwall in the extreme South West of England, and Site Gallery in Sheffield, Yorkshire in central, Northern England. I was keen to make a second piece, which could locate the work more specifically to Sheffield and Newlyn.
I took as my starting point the fact that the first transatlantic Morse code message was transmitted by Marconi from Cornwall, and given that I had very little bandwidth left to play with I tried to work out how I might be able to transmit an image by Morse, how long it would take and what it might look like. What emerged were my first Pixel landscapes. Collected pixel by pixel horizontally from top left to bottom right of the screen, and continually writing over themselves when 'complete', the images were transmitted - and updated - live to the gallery in the opposite location for the duration of the exhibition.
A few months later I was meeting with Steven Bode of Film and Video Umbrella who was wanting to commission online work exploring the relationship between landscape and technological innovation in East Anglia's 'Silicon Fen' area of England (named after the cluster of new technology companies that are located there), where technology is literally embedded in the flat horizons of a reclaimed landscape of canals, sluices, dykes and ditches. It seemed the perfect opportunity not only to marry the horizontality of my pixel landscapes to their subject, but also to develop the work further, distributing it live online as well as archiving (harvesting) images from the work over the course of a full year.
And so Fenlandia was born.
C. Z. - You also did Glenlandia in Loch Faskally, Perthshire, Scotland. Does this last piece differ from Fenlandia?
S. C. - Glenlandia - as the title suggests - is a sister piece to Fenlandia. Where Fenlandia refers to the Silicon Fen area of England, Glenlandia is referring to Scotland's Silicon Glen.
The piece is constructed in the same way as Fenlandia, and like Fenlandia, Glenlandia is also observing the relationship between landscape and technology over the course of a full year. In this case what appears to be a quintessentially 'natural' Scottish loch-side view, Loch Faskally is actually man made. It was created behind the hydro dam at Pitlochry, and the water levels in the Loch rise and fall according to demand in power.
C. Z. - I find these works match perfectly with the "landscape tradition", and at the same time they are so visionary that I think they really pushed forward the idea of landscape and the intrinsic detail of the "RIGHT NOW" in which the photo lives and dies. Is this historic tradition present in your mind and did it inspire you in some ways?
S. C. - I am very aware that these works lie somewhere between painting, photography and film.
The historic view of landscape is a very deliberate reference. I was seeking to compose the kind of view that a landscape painter (such as Millais) might have chosen.
Fenlandia is absolutely recording a landscape image as it (the camera) sees it - and the results are read as landscape - but because of the time shift the image is utterly recognizable and unrecognizable at the same time. It holds some surprises - for instance the occasions that a full moon is captured passing through the night sky - gives a real sense of planet/earth movement which serves to really consider nature in time and space …
The point of 'right now'- that you refer to interests me greatly in these works - as this point shifts constantly through each image, the 'right now' being the moment, the point at which that image is captured or archived - or if viewing it live, the point at which one finds the pixel moving inexorably forward….
The fact that one sees almost an entire day within a single frame means that certain things become visible, and others less so. For instance, the fluctuations in the light. The constant banding across the images show how frequently light changes throughout the day in a way that simply isn't perceptible ordinarily, and yet people or objects passing through instead of being captured in their entirety become quite abstract - represented by a captured pixel or two - whilst the permanent background of landscape itself endures, remains constant.
So the idea of an image developing over time becomes both explicit and implicit in the work.
C. Z. - This issue is about "Virtual Landscapes": I think Fenlandia is one of those projects challenging the common meaning people give to words such as "real" and "virtual". Was this your intention?
I'm also interested to hear about your perception of this subject in relation to our "online" age.
S. C. - For me Fenlandia represents what in this day and age appears to be an almost perverse desire to slow things down. The reverse in many ways to my earlier participatory/interactive works (such as In Conversation 1997) it is more a space for contemplation than participation. It did occur to me that it could be seen as almost proposing an equivalent to the 'slow food' movement, but for the Internet.
I haven't really answered the first part of your question though - I think in a sense one of the things I am interested in - rather than simply challenging notions of 'real' or 'virtual' - is the possibility the online world presents to be elsewhere - so in some respects I am exploring (my own) fantasies relative to that (in Fenlandia as with much of my other work) whilst simultaneously attempting to expose the reality of it (i.e. the means of production) as embedded in the work itself (if that makes sense?).
C. Z. - Speaking about networks, Underglow isn't made and/or visualized through the net but it unveils another "network", or better, a well-known (but usually never seen) networked system: the sewage system. What is your aim in creating this public installation?
S. C. - Underglow came about in response to an invitation from the Corporation of London to propose a lighting installation for the streets of the City of London. Since the early 90's I have made a number of interventions for the street and public places, most of which were inspired by a desire to quietly alter the given expectations of quite ordinary everyday situations. This project afforded an opportunity to not only work with light as a medium in itself which I haven't done before, but also access to the City streets from the inside, an opportunity to work with the infrastructure (in this case the corporation's drain engineers and electrical contractors). I was really thinking about the layers of history these London streets stand over, the hidden networks under the surface, the parts we normally choose not to think about let alone illuminate. My intention was for the drains to be stumbled across over time, with colours subtly changing so that whilst appearing to be static if you returned to a particular drain it might be quite different (in terms of colour) each time. There were some unexpected outcomes also. A series of drains at the Guildhall once illuminated became transformed into an apparent winter wonderland. What had been a litterbed of cigarette butts with grungy drain surround became a magical landscape one could peer down into with stalactites glistening as the light caught the ends of the drips.
C. Z. - Do you feel close to practices such as those of Christo and Jeanne Claude?
S. C. - I admire some of Christo and Jeanne Claude's work and the scale and impact of it, in particular works such as the pink-skirted islands. I see their work as part of a sculptural tradition that includes land artists such as Robert Smithson whom I have always been interested in, but feel at quite a distance from in terms of my own practice (which is much more ephemeral and almost the exact opposite of monumental). If searching out role models, artists working with intervention such as Krzysztof Wodiczko (although clearly also operating on a more monumental scale) would be closer and whilst more overtly political - the social contexts that he addresses in his work is something that I would aspire to.
C. Z. - I didn't have the chance to experience it but I can imagine people stopping in the middle of the street, watching under their feet, and trying to look for something - for a "reason why".
Did something like that really happen and what were people's reactions to this public work?
S. C. - I have been back a couple of times since I installed the work. And the last time I went, a Saturday, when the city of London is deserted and most things closed, there were quite a few people peering down these drains. I ended up having a conversation with one woman who said they almost directly followed her route to work, and she began coming across them. She had brought her partner back to have a look. For me this was exactly what I had hoped for. In many ways this work is the antithesis of spectacle. In order to be able to peer into this underworld the drains glow from within and don't project much light beyond - so you really need to be almost on top of them before you see them. For me it was all about creating something that some people may find and some may miss, but if found would in an intimate way open up a hitherto unseen world to the imagination.
C. Z. - At a first glance, Transporting Skies addresses a subject like ubiquity and the notion of "real" and "real time" where we live.
It also suggests to me a live streamed "copy and paste" of natural elements.
What I mean is that I see this work as an attempt to witness the ongoing digitization of flora and fauna's DNA and the very possible forthcoming disassemble-assemble practice over IP. Is this vision very far from your own?
S. C. - I haven't heard about disassemble-assemble over IP. I would like to know more. This sounds like the film 'The Fly' where Jeff Goldblum's DNA is teleported and reconstituted at the other end (with slightly unintended results) - that would be fantastic!
Your vision is not so far from my one I think and an interesting one for me to contemplate. For me it was about an attempt to make visible what it means to send information across time and place, and to expose the material that we use to do that with. The pixellation of the image was important to me, you can almost feel it being compressed and decompressed. There is an honesty to it with the clunkiness of the technology at this particular stage of its development an intrinsic part of it. I am not sure if I would have made this work if the technology were at the stage where it was unseen or seamless.
Time and time travel was something that I was also considering in this work. Initially I was concerned that it might be more interesting if transmitting over a longer distance - between different time zones for example. However what struck me were the subtleties it exposed between places only 350 miles apart. The fact that at that time of year (November) it got darker slightly earlier in Sheffield, and the fact that in Sheffield it never got truly dark because of urban light pollution meant that the projected image in Cornwall descended into a painterly, pixellated, vibrant red/black buzz in the late afternoons, while the image from Cornwall projected in the gallery in Sheffield was completely pitch black. I was also interested in the absurdity of the endeavour, this transmission of sky from one place to another, and the idea that the sky being transmitted would be traveling in its own time anyway, like clouds for instance.
C. Z. - I'm glad to read that you collaborated with Sarah Wigglesworth on the "Classroom of the Future".
I always thought that education (and politeness, which in Italian share the same word: "Educazione") plays a key role in growing and spreading welfare.
Can you please tell us more about it?
S. C. - This was an opportunity to work in collaboration with Sarah Wigglesworth (an exciting young british architect committed to innovation, experimentation and sustainable architecture). The Classroom of The Future is a new science teaching space for Mossbrook Special School, a special needs primary school in Sheffield, England. The school is situated in the green belt, and the classroom is sited overlooking a wildlife lake which in itself is a valuable teaching resource.
Sarah designed a building which is in itself a tactile and interactive environment and we were awarded an RSA Art for Architecture award to work collaboratively on integrating an interactive visual arts element into the building.
We were both interested in low tech and creative solutions, the potential of real space in conjunction with the virtual, how one space can inform the other, and above all we were interested in the experience of the inhabitants of a space over a period of time and the role of observation as central to both art and science. The classroom itself, including the art component has been designed for learning about the natural environment through direct interaction with it.
For me it became clear that the art component for the building should be about proposing interventions that were not authored artworks per se….but rather ways of building certain strategies into the fabric of the building that could become structures for the class (pupils and staff) to inhabit and make their own.
The core of the proposal is a wildlife surveillance system.
Screens have been built into the classroom - one in the floor and one in the wall that can play back images from a range of cameras placed in various locations around (and under) the classroom and wildlife pond.
They can show live images at all times, however images can also be archived and played back at any time.
These include images captured at night (local wildlife including badgers, bats and foxes) as well as timelapse photography that can be taken from certain camera positions over a much longer period of time.
The science teacher is being proactive in relation to the surveillance, finding ways of encouraging nesting and researching how to attract certain forms of wildlife for observation.
There is also a 'telepresent' remote control boat - a boat with wireless video cameras onboard - one under water and one above - which send video images back wirelessly to the screen in the classroom.
In relation to the relative high technology of LCD screens and wireless video I introduced a Camera Obscura to the building. As well as being an (accessible) introduction to optics it also brings the idea of a 'live' transmission of a moving image back to its original form using simply lens, mirrors and light.
There are many other aspects Sarah has included in the Classroom, from rainwater drainage to living walls and natural ventilation systems. In many senses this is a classroom which questions the future. Far from being futuristic in a sci fi sense, its focus as a science classroom is in exploring the natural world using a combination of old and new technology to examine the tools of observation themselves.
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Interview by Carlo Zanni
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