CAMBRIDGE.- Wysing Arts Centre presents wysingbroadcasts.art, a digital platform for new sound, video and text commissions by artists working within and around Wysing’s 2020 programme. The platform launches with new work by Catalina Barroso-Luque & Ferronia Wennborg, Rebecca Jagoe, Abi Palmer, Morgan Quaintance and Victoria Sin. Commissions will be launched each month, by artists Ruth Angel Edwards, Sonya Dyer, Juliet Jacques and many others. The site will also host Wysing’s annual Polyphonic art and music festival, Open Studios, interactions with residency artists’ and their works in progress, and other streamed events.

Curator at Wysing Arts Centre, John Bloomfield, said “Originally conceived as a platform for our residency artists, our new digital platform has taken on a special importance during the Covid-19 crisis, enabling us to support a greater number of small commissions by artists who may have had other opportunities cancelled. Many of the works respond to current times, and build on Wysing’s broadcast year, which was planned before the pandemic.”

The new commissions will unfold monthly throughout 2020, launching with six artists in July. Highlights include:

Catalina Barroso-Luque & Ferronia Wennborg present R-22, an experimental audio-narrative telling the domestic sci-fi tale of Refrigerant Gas 22 as they make their way through the distinct environments of a fridge cooling system. Named after the odourless gas that is used as a refrigerant and propellant, R-22 is one and many, embodying both dark and jovial aspects of individual and collective existence. The artists produced the work during lockdown using home recordings.

Shiten Mouth Ful of Tordes, Rebecca Jagoe’s podcast combines text, research, and musings examining gut health and herbal cures associated with laxatives, grounded in Western medicinal history. The work is structured around the artist’s fictional response to the medieval Welsh medical text The Physicians of Myddfai, bringing in Hildegard von Bingen’s writings on the stomach, astrology as a form of medicine, and a reading list of historic medical writings.

Morgan Quaintance’s new short film, Yemrahanah Krestos documents a journey through the Amhara region of Ethiopia to an 11th century Orthodox Christian Church embedded in the side of a mountain. The site is also the location of a large exposed tomb containing the skeletons of what are said to have been hundreds of pious monks who died spontaneously on arriving there.

Victoria Sin’s new commission, The Miracle Body; presents a soundscape of ambient tracks, samples and sketches, with writing-in-progress reflecting on the experience of taking things day by day, and sitting with one’s body in a constantly changing world.

wysingbroadcasts.art also presents a live stream from Wysing’s physical site inspired by They Call It Idlewild, Helen Cammock’s recent commission undertaken as part of a residency for Wysing in 2019 and early 2020, which explored the politics of idleness. In the context of more immediate lockdown-responsive conversations around idleness and productivity, the new audio live stream broadcasts the restful sounds of Wysing’s spaces, site and natural environment 24 hours a day.

wysingbroadcasts.art also includes research ‘threads’ compiling current interests and obsessions from artists David Blandy, Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Naomi Harwin, Tessa Norton and Wysing staff, along with highlights from Wysing’s recent programmes. The research threads are interactive and audiences are invited to respond with their own comments, links and suggestions.

The new platform will also host season two of TRANSMISSIONS, the online commissioning platform created by artist-producer-curator collective Tai Shani, Anne Duffau and Hana Noorali which selects artists to share new and existing work within a classic DIY TV show format, live streamed on Twitch.tv. TRANSMISSIONS aims to support artists during the coronavirus pandemic when many opportunities to show and progress work have been cancelled.

wysingbroadcasts.art will also be a platform for Wysing Polyphonic, the organisation’s much-loved annual festival of art and music. An online programme will begin on 3 August, culminating in a live-performance event on Saturday 5 September. A full lineup for Wysing Polyphonic will be released later in the summer.