Open seas, open systems

This article traces the author’s utilization of the sea as both generative device and communications channel, from an early student experiment sending out messages in bottles, and Transporting Skies , an exhibition made in response to the pioneering telegraph communications station at Porthcurno near Newlyn in Cornwall, one of the first places to be ‘on-line’ in a contemporary sense, to the present day. Reflecting on an ongoing series of works employing imagery captured and transmitted by network cameras pixel by pixel in real time from remote locations, including Seascape , which took in the panorama of the south-east coast of England, to the most recent, Current II , where the camera is situated within the sea itself, the article explores the sea as both an actual and metaphorical open system for generating artworks. It examines its role as collaborative ‘actor’ in the making of the author’s works, reflecting on the parameters it offers in the form of real-world analogue variables – comprising light, day, night, weather, the sun, the moon, the tides and the seasons and how this can surface new ways of observing and understanding temporality, our environment and ourselves.