Field Broadcast

Field Broadcast works with live digital broadcast as a medium, commissioning artists to make work specifically for this platform. Field Broadcast has developed through the practice of, and is run by, artists Rebecca Birch and Rob Smith. Field Broadcast works with a custom built app to send broadcasts directly to viewers’ desktops, tablets and phones, outside of a web browser. This method of transmission means that each broadcast arrives to the viewer unannounced, creating a unique experience for each viewer, who experiences the broadcast as an interruption in their daily activities. 

Field Broadcast is currently collaborating with LUX Artists Moving Image on a residency, awarded to curator Stefano Collicelli Cogol, which considers the context of the LUX collection, as a history of artists’ independent broadcasting and digital distribution, in relationship to a live event based practice. Following a period of research in the LUX archive Cogol will devise a live broadcast project combining news footage and contemporary artists’ moving image.

Recently completed projects include Scene on a Navigable River, revisiting an English Romantic landscape through live broadcast, with artists including Francesco Pedraglio, Paul Becker and Adam Chodzko, and Caddy Life in collaboration with Near Now at The Broadway Cinema, Nottingham, and Field Broadcast: West, in collaboration with the EMERGE Research Lab at Bournemouth University. 

Alongside curated projects Field Broadcast partners artists and organisations to facilitate new approaches to live broadcast, recent partnerships include The Infomoma, with artist Neal White and Portikus, Frankfurt, REEF with Simon Faithfull, Fabrica and The Brighton Photo Biennial, Clocking with Steph Fletcher, Manual Labours and In Certain Places and 24 Stops with Sarah Tripp and Camden Arts Centre.

The current Field Broadcast programme is funded by Arts Council England.