top of page
Lookout Line - a participatory model of consciousness: a way to experience how a single point of attention can gather a scattered world into a coherent, meaningful whole.
The Lookout Line follows a latitudinal line that passes directly through the top floor room at the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout. 26 points of encounter along this line were located where people around the world could be found going about their lives - from a merry go round, to a balcony hot tub, or churches in the Netherlands, from an open mine in Kazakhstan to an indigenous Siberian community along the Amur River An edition print was sent out to a recipient on each of these points., along with a description of the project and a badge identifying connection with a global community, previously unknown to itself, travelling along a direct path through the top room at the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, - together forming a unifying sculpture of consciousness in space and time.
Shepard invited people to stand in the top room of the South Lookout and imagine themselves still in space while the Earth turns beneath them, and meeting in that same room the people who occupy the other aligned places as those locations rotate into the tower’s fixed spatial coordinate - a lived, temporal experience of a global procession: a community that never occupies the room at the same clock time, but is perfectly aligned in space as the planet rotates.
Along with various research material from the project Shepard exhibited, a line of photographs spanned the room of each human‑occupied place that lies exactly on the defined latitude/elevation line into which an image of the Aldeburgh lookout tower at its relative spatial position within that scene was inserted.
​
The Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, Aldeburgh Suffolk during a Lookout Artist Residency, - September 2021
Awarded the inaugural Francis Carnwath Prize for the Arts - 2021





26 boxes containing a rolled print of the Lookout Line printed on the same paper used for Ordnance Survey Maps, a badge and a letter describing the project, assembled inside the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout before being posted out to the 26 recipients along latitude 52° 9'2.04"N at 15m elevation. Badges were also given to everyone who visited the Lookout during the residency and exhibition.





Visitors to the exhibition were asked to imagine the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout becoming completely still whilst the earth continued to turn so that one after the other, those on the 26 points of encounter along the Lookout Line would arrive and pass through the exhibition space. Posted on the wall was a schedule of arrival.

The Lookout Line was a collaborative project, coming into being through the consciousness of those living along the line and those who visited the installation in the Lookout Tower exhibition space. Bringing the project together could also not have been done without the wonderful support and assistance given by the people listed above.
bottom of page
