Field Broadcast is a live broadcast project developed and directed by artists Rob Smith and Rebecca Birch. It grew from practices rooted in both landscape and the space of the screen, exploring the potentials of technology and software development. In Field Broadcast projects, artworks come into being both in the dust of the desert, or the mud of a riverbank, and in the digital functioning of laptops, phones and tablets.

Field Broadcast works with ideas of remoteness and connectivity, intimacy and distance. Its medium is live digital broadcast, and it commissions artists to make work specifically for this platform. Broadcasts are made from particular locations, in interaction with the surroundings, which become an actor within the work. The Field Broadcast app, first developed in 2010, sends live broadcasts directly to our audiences’ computer desktops (outside of a web browser) and our projects have since evolved with the developments of technologies onto the screens of phones and tablets. This method of transmission means that broadcasts arrive unannounced into the viewer’s screen space. Each individual experience is unique, a montage of the Field Broadcast window with the personal clutter of a computer desktop or the private sphere of the mobile phone screen. In this sense Field Broadcast works with, and harnesses the potential of interruption, and distraction as a mode of aesthetic experience.

From the outset of the project, Field Broadcast has operated in parallel modes; as commissioning and curatorial platform inviting artists to make new work; as artists' professional development and alternative education platform; as research project and testbed for new modes of dissemination of existing artworks; as partner with institutions; and collaborator with individual artists.