Not long after the first wave of new technology companies began congregating in the hinterland of Cambridge, this stretch of East Anglia - too flat and featureless ever to be mistaken for a 'silicon valley' - started becoming known as 'silicon fen'. Taking this increasingly popular epithet as its title, Silicon Fen was a three-year programme of digital art works exploring themes of landscape and technological innovation in relation to the history and geography of the East Anglian Fenland. Working in collaboration, Norwich University College of the Arts (formerly Norwich School of Art and Design) and Film and Video Umbrella commissioned six new art works, each of them produced in partnership with galleries located in or around the Fenland region. The partner venues were: BCA Gallery, Bedford; King's Lynn Arts Centre; Peterborough Digital Arts and Babylon Gallery, Ely. Contrasting the distinctively haunting, empty landscapes of this historically remote part of the country with images of a wired-up, networked future generated by its increasing technological development, Silicon Fen explored these contemporary changes in the context of earlier influences. As the science parks and research campuses spread from Cambridge out to Ely and beyond, these new centres of innovation are drawn into proximity with an engineering phenomenon that, four centuries earlier, was the technological marvel of its day: the system of sluices, dykes and ditches, constructed by the Dutch architect Cornelius Vermuyden, to drain and protect the vast agricultural basin of the Fens.

Much of this area of East Anglia is now being bisected by an information infrastructure of high-speed networks and broadband links that rivals that earlier system of canals and ditches for ambition, scope and intricacy. Working closely with the new digital technologies that are shaping and connecting this newly emerging 'information-rich' environment, the selected artists drew on a range of techniques and approaches, from digital photography and video to artists' websites and multimedia installations. Highlighting the age-old and enduring relationship between land and water, and extending it with new themes of media 'inundation' and information 'flow', this ongoing series of artists' commissions set out to capture the many changing facets of this unique and fascinating part of the world.