Silicon Fen
Far From Silicon Fen by Things Not Worth Keeping
A ten minute image-text-sound work that playfully explores the origins and ideologies of naming places to perform a critique of techno-romanticism.
Part of Silicon Fen
“Not long after the first wave of new technology companies began congregating in the hinterland of Cambridge, this stretch of East Anglia - too flat and featureless ever to be mistaken for a ’silicon valley’ - started becoming known as ’silicon fen’. Taking this increasingly popular epithet as its title, Silicon Fen is a three-year programme of digital art works exploring themes of landscape and technological innovation in relation to the history and geography of the East Anglian Fenland…
Contrasting the distinctively haunting, empty landscapes of this historically remote part of the country with images of a wired-up, networked future generated by its increasing technological development, Silicon Fen will consider some of these contemporary changes in the context of earlier influences…Much of this area of East Anglia is now being bisected by an information infrastructure of high-speed networks and broadband links that rivals that earlier system of canals and ditches for ambition, scope and intricacy…Highlighting the age-old and enduring relationship between land and water, and extending it with new themes of media ‘inundation’ and information ‘flow’, this ongoing series of artists’ commissions sets out to capture the many changing facets of this unique and fascinating part of the world.”
Thanks Pat!