Thomson & Craighead

Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead are an artistic duo that have worked across an entire generation of societal shifts in response to developments in technology and science. Working across a variety of mediums – sculpture, video, installation, sound – they have been present at many of the conceptual cornerstones of contemporary art: from 1970s structuralist film-making, to early pioneers in the net.art phenomenon, their work now occupies a conceptual place of its own, interrogating the myriad effects of contemporary technology on our understanding of the world.

Over the last decade, Thomson and Craighead’s practice has increasingly focused on human biology, the rise of the internet and the information age. Their earlier works, such as Browser Archaeology – a playable rendition of Atari’s Breakout, which locks you into a Netscape 4 browser page until you successfully fight your way out – or Trigger Happy (1998) – a Space Invaders gallery installation, where the alien hoard takes the form of text from Roland Barthes’ influential ‘Death of the Author’ – were wholly baptized in the vernacular of early internet art – focusing heavily on the medium itself and its virtual possibilities. But over the last decade their practice has quickly revolutionised in tandem with its technological muses, deconstructing and reassembling to capture its accelerating potential.

Browser Archeology (1998) 

Their first shift came in the wake of the 2001 dot-com crash and the rising significance of data analytics in both computing and automation – it was in the same year that the META Group published their original and formative research paper on the emerging challenges posed by increasing and diversifying data loads. In 2003 they created the piece Weather Gauge, a live-data installation that simultaneously monitored weather statistics in 105 countries; and in 2004, Decorative Newsfeed, an animated live-news wheel that curves and twirls around its screen, raising questions on the mutability of information and the importance of its medium. These artworks signalled a shift from Thomson and Craighead’s origins in net.art to more subtle concerns with the rise of data-based information technologies and the deepening roots of digitization.

The same experimentation present in Gauge and Newsfeed continued into some of their later works, with both Belief (2012) and A Short Film about War (2009) utilising images and content exclusively sourced from the worldwide web to create fractured and warping narratives on contemporary issues through the image banks of Flickr and YouTube. In both cases, the visual content is mirrored by a tautological logging apparatus: in the case of Belief, a compass directing the viewer to the content’s global origins, and in War, a primitive blog-source text log runs parallel. These analogous media forms serve to ‘explore and reveal the way in which information changes as it is gathered, edited and then mediated through networked communications technologies or broadcast media, and how that changes and distorts meaning’.

Weather Gauge (2003) 

Belief (2012)

A Short Film about War (2009) 

In the last five years Thomson and Craighead have continued to push their practice to incorporate new and pertinent developments in human knowledge and experimentation. Their Corruption (2014) series, a subtle and self-effacing aesthetic mediation on historical Modernism and contemporary techno-virology, recodifies an instance of file corruption as a moment of visceral digital beauty. Using lenticular printing, each portrait consists of several frames of the corrupting virus which animates and playbacks as the viewer moves around the artwork, emphasising the nature of looking and perception in our formation of reality.

Their most exciting recent works, however, are Stutterer (2014) and Temporary Index (2016), both exhibited alongside Corruption in their solo-show last year at the Carroll Fletcher Gallery in London. The latter work takes a minimal form: a rustling and anxious set of numerical columns uncomfortably poised 90 degrees off centre. Accompanying the large screen is a small table, topped with an open booklet detailing 9 nuclear waste storage facilities that correspond to the crumbling numerical towers in front of the reader. Each digital clock represents a countdown until these sites of inhumed nuclear waste become safe again for humans, ranging from its soonest at forty years, to sites uninhabitable for over one million years.

Corruption (2014) & Temporary Index (2016)

The former, Stutterer, shunts their sombre, minimal tone into a schizophrenic overload. Once again faced with an abstract trail of alphanumerical code, pitched in a silent, B&W projection, this time the audience is also faced with a hypnotic fusillade of broadcast media clips that chime in succession with the slowly unravelling cipher. A ‘poetry machine’, using the letters T, C, G and A – representative of the coded human genome and its four nucleotide bases – in correlation with a self-assembling collection of 500 clips from broadcast media in the 13 years it took the Human Genome Project to complete it (1990-2003). If the piece were allowed to play out its full 3.2 billion letters, it would run continuously for over sixty years.

Shuttering between images of the decade – from the 9/11 attacks to Thatcher at the despatch box, Mandela’s release from prison and the US & British invasion of Baghdad – the strobing clips give a stark portrait of the recent socio-political developments that have sistered our rapid advances in both molecular biology and computer technologies. It re-establishes the often neutral, and atomised narrative of technological innovation with its often-darker political framework. It asks important questions, such as to what extent are our rapid industrial and technological advances a result of aggressive imperialist policies abroad? Or to what degree are those very developments transforming and disguising new forms of political power and suppression?

This eponymous conceptual provocation, that technology and politics are ‘stuttered’, unaligned with the teleological boulevards of their great Enlightenment muses, chaotically provoking, attacking and engendering one another across time and space, marks a radical break from the insidious nature of our collective unconscious: that the progression of technology and politics are a deterministic and naturally flowing progression of ideas, research and science.

The truth, is that knowledge and power and never inextricable. Just as physiognomy in the 18th century was the medico-scientific manifestation of institutionalised racism, recent developments in biological and zoological research could rather be used to give birth to an army of inexhaustible cyborgian soldiers. Understanding and being critical of these points at which technology, science and power interact is of vital importance to us in a world increasingly defined by an obfuscated material reality. And one which, even at the moments when we see it clearest, is becoming weirder and weirder.