School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Digital landscape and nature-morte

CUBITT, SEAN ( 2006)

Susan Collins' Glenlandia (and its immediate predecessor Fenlandia) employs a webcam on location feeding a plasma screen with a resolution of 320 x 240. The pixels arrive at one per second. It takes 76,800 seconds to complete an image, 21.33 hours, just under a day. Chances are that there will be a dark area of night (though Collins reports instances of a smear of moon across a night-time sky) and inexplicable artefacts, pixels of intense and unexpected colours appearing day or night, perhaps starlight or some unwitting creature flitting across the field of view. Hovering between photograph and moving image, the slow accrual of image, the slow erasure of the previous picture, make this in some interesting ways exemplary of the capacities of digital media, in particular some aspects of referentiality, and most specifically, in the first instance, the question of the representation of time.