Digital Arts Project Takes Flight

Newcastle University and the National Trust have a long history of collaboration around contemporary art and heritage. Now, four new creative digital commissions will explore the potential of digital technologies to support contemporary art commissioning for heritage sites in the On-Site/Off-Site project.

The commissions will respond to the work of Thomas Bewick who himself embraced the latest technologies of the eighteenth century to manifest his love of the countryside and nature through exquisitely detailed prints, drawings and engravings to reach wide audiences.

The project is launched by Marcus Coates piece Video Conference for the Birds. In 2019, Coates responded to Bewick’s Northumbrian birthplace Cherryburn. He created Conference for the Birds, installing seven large papier maché bird’s heads in the Bewick print style in Bewick's birthplace cottage. Visitors were invited to sit under the heads and listen to a group of birds discussing their life, their habitats, and their concerns for the future.

Now, for his new digital work, Coates has gathered the birds together once again to conduct their discussion in a video conference Video Conference for the Birds.

Marcus said: “Thomas Bewick used wood engraving because the medium suited his extraordinary drawing skills, 'I know no drawing so subtle as Bewick's since the fifteenth century except Holbein's and Turner's.' John Ruskin 1819-1900. But, importantly it also enabled printing costs to be lower than more modern techniques, meaning his books were affordable to more of the population and therefore knowledge of the natural world was able to become more widely known for the first time.

“This desire to bring the natural world to a wider audience resonates with me, this is part of the motivation for re-presenting this work in a digital form. Also Bewick was a keen observer of mankind as well as the natural world, he celebrated the 'life of his age', offering depictions of human traits and traditions in his 'tail' pieces, bringing these worlds together in his books. Video Conference for the Birds, 2023 attempts to do this also, to give insight into both the perspectives of the human and the bird world.”