Scene on a Navigable River

Adam Chodzko & Gretchen Egolf | Beth Collar | Ben Judd | Rory Macbeth | Florence Peake | Paul Becker & Francesco Pedraglio | Way Through | Ian Whittlesea

New live artworks broadcast instantaneously to computers, tablets & mobile phones curated by Field Broadcast.

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Constable’s famous pastoral landscapes of rolling farmland, rivers and meadows are the setting for Scene From 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. 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 desktop, tablet or mobile phone, revisiting an English Romantic landscape through the personal realm of apps, screensavers and gifs.

Field Broadcast have commissioned eight artists including Artsadmin Associate Artist Florence Peake to create new works for broadcast from Dedham Vale, location of many of Constables paintings.

Florence Peake will transmit Cloud Study. Flat green, firmament, weighted puffs all heading for the horizon; one falls, a hefty white shape. Lay on the grass, took the afternoon off, allowed itself a breather. It happens right there in plane view, a segment of up there, down here. There in that field. Long grass, buttercups, lying there unnoticed, exhaling. Nobody saw except sky bright, sky ochre, sky blond pounding blue, gradations of grey, bulbous ink and all the rest just did their usual routine of drifting on by. Small figures below kept still, holding tight for a hundred years or so, straightened up, uncrick necks, blow air from puffed cheeks and then resumed their position. Puzzled, eyebrows raised left it there and turned back to addressing yesterday’s light fractured on billowing damson. Unknowingly, coming up the rear, a monster hung yawning, passed overhead, cue position and set forever as 'Item 363 of 504'.