2,273 research outputs found
Thomson & Craighead at Peacock Arts for Look Again Festival
No full textLondon based visual artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead work across video, sound, sculpture, installation and online space. Through sensitive appropriation of images, texts, and data from online and archived sources, the artists produce generous, lyrical works that both exercise the dramatic conventions of cinema and examine the changing socio-political structures of the information age. They present a new generative moving image work for Look Again called Control Room alongside two existing artworks, Aberdeen Wall (2010 – 2017) and Here (2013)
Thomson & Craighead, HICA (Highland Institute of Contemporary Art)
No full textThomson & Craighead present a selection of new and recent work about time and place.
HICA commissioned an called essay Imagine No Horizons, by Alistair Rider which is published in their Exhibitions 2010 publication.
New work included The End & Time Machine in Alphabetical Order
Vital Spark Award 2011-2012
No full textAlison Craighead and Jon Thomson where awarded a Vital Spark Award in 2011 from Creative Scotland. This is one of eight awarded this year.
"Visual Artists, Thomson and Craighead, and sound designer John Cobban from Glasgow have collaborated with writer Steve Rushton based in Rotterdam and GPS software developer Matt Jarvis based in the Netherlands to create a documentary artwork made entirely from information found on the World Wide Web. The documentary will explore the notion of belief as mediated by online social networks. (£30,000)
Samsung Art Prize
No full textJon Thomson and Alison Craighead where nominated for the first Samsung Art PRIZE . In the accompanying exhibition at BFI Southbank, London they showed Horizon and A short film about War. The exhibition runs until 29th January 2012.Also there is a pull out magazine on the artists involved in Saturday 14th January 2012 Financial Times
Collaborative and participatory practices as an agent of autonomy
No full textPanel discussion exploring collaborative and participatory practices as an agent of autonomy in the context of New Contemporaries 75-year history with artists Cullinan Richards, Alan Kane & Alison Craighead (Thomson & Craighead), chaired by Kirsty Ogg
Thomson & Craighead, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
No full textModerna Museet invited Mejan Labs to curate two installations by the British artists Thomson & Craighead. This solo exhibition was in Studio at Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Works included:
BEACON when it is shown as a data projection in a gallery. As with the online version and railway flap sign, live web searches are continuously relayed as they are being made around the world -in this case onto a gallery wall in series and at regular intervals as an endless concrete poetry.
Decorative Newsfeeds use a live feed from the web to present up to the minute headline news from around the world as a series of pleasant animations, allowing viewers to keep informed while contemplating a kind of readymade sculpture or perhaps an automatic drawing
The Academy of Saturn
No full textThe Cooley Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition by celebrated UK artist-collaborators Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead. Since the mid-1990s, Thomson & Craighead have explored the visual, statistical, and poetic nature of networked information and its relationship to capitalism, war, and everyday life. The title of the exhibition—The Academy of Saturn—derives from Voltaire’s 1752 novella Micromégas, in which colossal astral travelers from The Academy of Saturn visit earth and engage in a philosophical discussion with a group of scientists. Radical scale shifts of knowledge and comprehension result in an absurd, zero-sum exchange between the species; however, the story is an acerbic parable about the inanity of war and the value of external perspective. With kindred tenacity and wit, Thomson & Craighead explore global information’s competing—and increasingly intertwined—experiences of intimacy and incomprehensibility, touching information to be here now. Distillation, order, and observation take different forms throughout the exhibition. The monumental Horizon (2009–present), for instance, comprises a grid of real-time webcam images from every time zone in the world. In Thomson’s words: “The result is a constantly updating array of images that read like a series of movie storyboards, but also as an idiosyncratic global electronic sundial.” As Horizon conjoins time and space in axial form, it amplifies the lyricism of each circadian landscape. Thomson & Craighead also snare and repurpose networked information in material form, often working with ongoing streams of personal utterance. For The Academy of Saturn, the artists are creating a new iteration of their text-based project London Wall (2010–present), entitled, appropriately, Portland Wall. The work is based on public “status updates” posted on Twitter and Facebook in a three-mile radius from the Cooley. The texts are transformed into graphic posters and installed onto the walls of the gallery, forming a vast meander of endlessly readable concrete poetry—fleeting thoughts, arrested and echoed in their community of origin. Perhaps the artists’ most alchemical work—Apocalypse (2016)—atomizes the King James Bible’s account of the horrors of the End Times in the form of a luxury perfume (developed in collaboration with Edinburgh perfumer Euan McCall). The project was inspired by Master Bertram von Minden’s fifteenth-century altarpiece depicting forty-five scenes from the Book of Revelations (housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London). The artists determined Apocalypse’s olfactory notes by calculating the number of times a given substance, such as “blood” or “flesh,” is mentioned in the text. Thomson & Craighead’s interest in the found poetry of historical narrative and networked culture speaks to artistic forms such as the Oulipo movement founded in the 1960s. Oulipo artists constructed their work using patterned constraints such as palindromes and the S+7 technique, in which each noun in a text is replaced with the seventh noun that follows it in the dictionary. In Thomson & Craighead’s sculpture Here (2011–present, also produced in a new iteration for the Cooley) a regulation street sign displays the distance the sign exists from itself if pointing in the direction of the North or South pole. Like a palindrome, the work encapsulates its own unidirectional movement: physical geography tuned to the logic of networked space
Maps DNA and Spam
No full textWe are delighted to welcome back artists Thomson & Craighead to DCA for our first exhibition of 2014. Maps DNA and Spam features new work (Dundee Wall and The First Person) and a selection of older work including The Time Machine in alphabetical order, Belief and A short film about War. Much of Thomson & Craighead's recent work looks at how communications networks like the worldwide web are changing the way we relate to the world around us - the conflict between our private and public identities, the tension between the global and the local and the way in which modern communications inform our sense of place and self in the world. The exhibition includes new two new works: The First Person (2013), an endless stream of first person statements taken from American self-help websites, randomly intercut with found video footage of a burning house; and Dundee Wall (2014) a poetic snapshot of social networking traffic from within this city, published as typeset posters and pasted up within DCA. Two earlier works in the exhibition draw on information found entirely online: A Short Film about War (2009) is a narrative documentary artwork which takes viewers around the world to a variety of war zones as seen through the collective eyes of the online photo sharing community Flickr, and as witnessed by a variety of existing military and civilian bloggers; while Belief (2011-12) presents a series of fragmented broadcasts about faith, all sourced from the video sharing community YouTube. Other works on display include The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order (2010) a complete re-edit of the 1960s film version of HG Wells Novella reconfigured by the artists into alphabetical order from beginning to end. Jon Thomson, born 1969, and Alison Craighead, born 1971, studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee and now live and work in Scotland and London. Jon Thomson is Reader in Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, while Alison Craighead is Reader in Visual Culture and Contemporary Art at University of Westminster and lectures in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University London. Thomson & Craighead have been working together since 1993. Recent exhibitions include MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen and Carroll/Fletcher, London
The Internet of Living Things
No full textStructured in three parts, I Was Raised on the Internet features critical essays, provocations, and manifestos, as well as images of new commissions for the accompanying exhibition. The book functions independently of the exhibition as a contribution to the knowledge of art and technology studies. Esteemed authors and creative practitioners-including Monira Al Qadiri, Jeremy Bailey, Zach Blas, James Bridle, Michael Connor, Lauren Cornell, Aria Dean, Simon Denny, DIS, Orit Gat, Omar Kholeif, Cadence Kinsey, Olia Lialina, Joanne McNeil, Trevor Paglen, Heather Phillipson, Jared Quinton, Martine Syms, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, and Nina Wexelblatt-use the book as a jumping-off point to broaden the critical debate on art that engages with continually evolving digital technologies
Belief
No full textBelief is made from information found entirely on the worldwide web. In fifteen minutes, this two-screen installation presents a series of fragmented broadcasts about belief, all sourced from the video sharing community YouTube.
A compass floor projection interacts with the montage showing where each clip originated in relation to the geographical location of the artwork. With a little help from Google Earth viewers are placed at the centre point of this cinematic data visualisation.
Supported by Creative Scotland's Vital Spark programme, New Media Scotland's Alt-w Fund, ATLAS Arts and Animate Projects. Software development by Matthew Jarvis, sound design by John Cobban and script development by Alison Craighead, Jon Thomson and Steve Rushton. Graphic design by Cavan Convery
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