For audio-visual artist and urbanist Sam Appleby the key problem is representation - how urban space is communicated to us by various media. Rather than documenting the New Town of Bracknell in the conventional way, which takes for granted the notion of the photograph as truth, forest/borough looks at the relationship between photography and the New Town.

After so many years of dismissal is it possible that at fifty years old the New Town might at last be considered part of our heritage? If so, how do we photograph the New Town for heritage, for history?
Part one iconises and solemnifies some of the architectural details we take for granted but which are quintessentially New Town.

In the philosophy of the New Town nature and the countryside are never far away. Part two symbolises the coming of the New Towns and the super-imposition of mid-century technologism whilst noting our culture’s fascination and obsession with The Forest as both comforting and threatening.

The final part filters the New Town’s present and future through the representational mode of paranoid speculative fiction utilising the codes of the surveillance and security video and the noise and confusion of global communication, in which Bracknell becomes a kind of LA, an Orange County, Berks.

forest/borough was originally commissioned in spring 1996 by Southern Arts and Bracknell Borough Council for exhibition in the summer of that year at South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell. forest/borough is the latest in a loosely connected series of audio-visual works examining visual representations of urban space and continues Sam Appleby’s more specific interest in the popular image of the British New Town.

forest/borough one

forest/borough two

forest/borough three