Chris Speed / Jane Macdonald / Jules Rawlinson / Margaret Stewart

Streaming Casts


Reminding us of the role that the cast collection has played in the art college as models for drawing and painting, the following video piece offers a contemporary frame within we can reflect upon them as elements within compositions. 

Network technologies have placed pressure on the concept of ‘real-time’, delays due to technical latency across networks, differences in connections both in resolution and speed, and the financial frameworks which enable access according to cost have all contributed to the collapse of the technical and cultural concept of ‘real-time’. In many ways the cast collection offers an example of a series of historical artefacts that remain in circulation, ghosts in the machine or glitches in cultural time and space, not yet locked up in a museum they may be considered one of the slowest technologies that the college possesses.

Studio XX will be used to construct a scene referential in part to Courbet and Velasquez’s paintings of the artist’s studio. Aware of the available natural northern light, the studio will be streamed using a high definition camera to an equally high definition LCD screen in close proximity to the studio. Unable to access the studio the digital representation will be the only means of accessing the image.

A computer will mediate the scene’s place in time by controlling the image that is displayed on the LCD screen. There are a number of variations that may be explored in doing this:

• Working within a delay, if the computer detects a movement within the scene the streaming image will slow down until the scene has settled down again and return to something closer to realtime.

• Slow Scan TV effect will be used throughout the stream offering still images that differ only slightly as each scan passes.

With the potential of streaming the scene to the internet, the still image although will be subject to the subtle changes in natural light from the windows and the movement of the model according to her/his comfort.

The piece evokes questions of:
Ubiquitous casts, Web casts, Cast theory, Indexicality, Interference

Developed by:
Chris Speed, ECA
Mike Phillips, i-DAT, University of Plymouth
Jane Macdonald, ECA