Project Space: Rob Smith

Rob Smith is the latest artist to be invited to contribute a Project Space to the ArtReview website. Visitors will be presented with an image created from one of 15 videos of the 2012 Olympic site each time they view Scanner. As a consequence each viewer will, in effect, be presented with a different work, which slowly reveals itself, highlighting its pixel makeup as it does, on each consecutive visit. Based in the East of England Smith has exhibited internationally and is currently co-ordinating Field Broadcast (alongside Rebecca Birch and PROJECKT), a project for the Wysing Arts Centre. ArtReview’s Oliver Basciano spoke to him about Scanner and his practice.

ArtReview: What was the process behind Scanner’s production?

Rob Smith: I began making these works last summer, taking the equipment into the field and recording the sampling of the pixels live, creating the videos onsite with no postproduction. It is an approach that I continued for The Pembury Road Spectroscope at LEDGE earlier this year, sampling the colours of cars passing the gallery. It is part of ongoing process to describe landscape as a dynamic and changing entity.

Scanner quite literally scans across the screen much like a desktop scanner. But instead of scanning a still image it scans across a video sampling pixels as it passes and flashing up the sampled colours to fill the frame. As the scanner re-samples the image the pixels gradually accumulate to present a composite image of the duration of the video that fills the frame. The videos I have used are shot from a motorised pan head camera and so the image unfolds to reveal a 360º view of the site where it was recorded.

AR: Scanner slowly reveals various images of the Olympic redevelopment site in the East London? How important is this quite loaded location to the work?

RS: It is certainly important that the images are from/can be associated with a particular time and place. The videos used here are from a series of 60 films originally shot on the Olympic site a few weeks before the blue fence surrounded the site (emblazoned with the slogan ‘demolish, dig, design’). At the time I was definitely motivated by the misrepresentation of the site through the media and the compulsory purchase orders that destroyed communities and facilitated the change of what was once publicly accessible land into private ownership. These series of 60 one-minute panoramas were my elegy to a landscape that I lived in and knew well.

Re-using the footage here now, more than two years after it was shot, that the landscape has been changed beyond recognition gives a new perspective. Re-sampling and fixing these heightened colours and seeing the distorted landscapes that come out of the process, it now seems a lot like the memories of these places that I knew then.

AR: Tell me about the highlighting of colours? What are the ideas behind it?

RS: In some ways this is a quite formal aspect to the work, the colours are part of a process of abstraction and representation or replication of the image in which the image is chopped into its constituent units and recompiled and of course this is how digital data functions, after all it’s all 0s and 1s.

Pixels are the building blocks of digital imagery and video can be seen as a constantly shifting matrix of coloured squares and so it seems a natural step to amplify the pixels to fill the frame of the video. To me these pixels represent a constantly changing data set – a set of variables – they are colours to be sampled over a period of time. The sampling of the pixels sets the timescale of the work. The size of website’s frame becomes the time- limiting parameter; once the frame is full another video is loaded and the process starts again.

The pixels/colours, when blown up out of the video, appear arbitrary but as the image accumulates an underlying order is revealed. In a lot of ways it relates to how we experience landscape: patterns and structures coming in and out of focus, yet the elements can be admired in isolation too.

AR: Is there a political intent to the work at all? Scanner and other works ‘capture’ people into the work, it reminds me of the pervasive control of CCTV.

I don’t really see it, I would associate it more with social networking tools like Facebook and Skype and instant messengers than CCTV. They are pervasive but we agree and sign up to them. These modes of contact are becoming so ubiquitous and, like all these technologies, are part of my toolkit to make work.

I hope that desktop applications bring a different, more intimate, encounter with the work through the computer. It’s not 1984 by any means, but more a way of sidestepping some of the usual art world hoops and taking it direct to an audience.

AR: There is frequently a sense of time in your works. This manifests itself in filmed time, but for example in Scanner, the viewer must be patient for the full image to reveal itself. What does this waiting do for the work?

RS: In Scanner there is clear link between the production of the image to the duration of the piece, and in a lot of my works the timescale is very often defined in the mechanism or logic of the artwork.
What I want to get across is a representation of landscape that is dynamic and changing, so to place the viewer into a controlled timeframe while viewing the work can highlight that. There is a satisfaction in waiting to see the completion of the process, a moment where the mechanism completes or reveals itself.

AR: There’s the sound element too…

RS: The soundtrack of the ambient noises of the site really help to define the timeframe of the work, it acts as a constant and acts as a counterpoint to the second timeframe of the sampling process.

AR: There is a physical remoteness to the work, to the artist and the viewer (yet conversely the work invades one’s personal computer space)? The viewer only encounters the work ‘through’ their computer. Do you think this differentiates it from the normal encounter between viewer-work-artist?

RS: I feel I will be able to answer this question better when Field Broadcast has gone live on Saturday 8th May. This is a nine-day live broadcasting project that I have developed with Rebecca Birch that will enable artists – and there are around 30 involved – to broadcast live from a field directly to a viewer’s computer. A desktop application that I have made will go ping and launch a window that displays the broadcast in the middle of whatever they are doing on their computer. This means that people will view artists’ works in their homes, in offices, cafes and so on at a time when they have maybe not planned for, so in this way it is a new way to encounter an artwork. Viewers will not be prepared in the way that we prime and condition ourselves to enter a gallery. From the artists’ end it is maybe less different, the success of any artwork depends on it functioning in the context it is seen in, so the context might be different but the challenge is the same. It is quite romantic in some ways… the artist out in the field alone sending out a signal in the hope that it will reach an audience.

AR: How did you come to combine computer programming and an art practice?

RS: I am a DIY-er at heart. So once I had started making websites to show people my work it wasn’t long before I realised that tools like flash and max/MSP seemed to offer a host of opportunities to present work in a different context, to engage with live data breakdown and remake images and videos and realise ideas that would otherwise be impossible. In this respect it is not that different to any other process, a learning-through-doing approach, seeing how things work and developing that alongside your ideas and taking the practice onwards. I have equally learned the ins and outs of pinhole photography, honed my carpentry and so on.

AR: How integral is pushing what programming can do to your practice?
At the end of the day the software is a tool and if it helps you do what you want then it’s a good tool and if not, then you find another. Using and working with these tools opens up possibilities for the work’s direction. I think we need to knock the idea of digital arts on the head: using a computer is just the same as using a paintbrush or a chainsaw.