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.

Spotlight: Femke Herregraven

How much of capitalism can we see from the moon?



When you think of the financial market – insurance, banking, stocks, hedge-funds – you’re likely to conjure images of Wall Street, the City, Hong Kong. Men in pin-striped suits with Versace cufflinks striding down sterilized boulevards and chain-smoking Menthol Superkings in pseudo-public parks, all encased in a labyrinth of glass, steel and Starbucks. You think of the monolithic skyscrapers, of the All Bar Ones and the bottles of Moet. A world that wholly exists inside the parameters of a single square mile, or even just one street. And when you talk of the financial market, it is simply impossible to escape our established nautical lexicon: Flows and ripples of capital; investor liquidity and market equilibrium; dark pools, channels and floating assets. The market has frozen, evaporated. The trickle down effect. 

The immense scale and complexity of the contemporary web of global financial trade, geopolitics and information-technology networks, reduced to a single image or a single metaphor. During this gross consolidation a vast material reality is concealed. These representations curtail and obfuscate an entire economic and political infrastructure that exists hidden in scattered warehouses across northeast China, on the banksides of the Columbia River and across the vast plains of the Icelandic countryside. Finance as ‘hyperobject’: an entity with both global omnipresence and –potence hiding almost entirely beyond human comprehension. 

Working at the intersections of these incommensurable Leviathans, Dutch artist Femke Herregraven has devoted her artistic practice to re-materialising the invisible contours of our contemporary landscapes of financial power. Coming from a background in design, Herregraven has gone on to produce art which stems from an ongoing research project into finding the secret places that capital and data hide – or are hidden. Taking the official form of a printed book in 2011, her still-ongoing project, Geographies of Avoidance, is a quest for the bare realities of tax avoidance through global financial distribution.

After taking up an artist’s residency in Amsterdam’s financial sector, Zuidas, Herregraven became quickly aware of the distinct lack of financial activity that taking place around her. Upon asking her facilitators if there was a list of companies that operated in the building/street, she was met with the reply, ‘No such list exists, and if it did, we wouldn’t give it to you.’ Forced to accumulate the data herself, Herregraven delved into the neighbouring Chamber of Commerce registers and produced a geographical index of the whole of Zuidas. 

Each index in Geographies of Avoidance represents a single address in the district. Some addresses, as shown, have one or two operational businesses and companies registered, some have ten or twenty. And some have a few thousand.

 

 

Geographies of Avoidance, 2011 

In some cases, however, whoever it is rerouting their capital through the Netherlands via these mailbox companies has lost even the faintest sign of discretion. Company titles flow down the page from Alpha 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. To Bravo, Foxtrot 10, V. O. F and Euro Zinger III. Alongside these facetious scripts of nominally-legitimate companies are info-graphics on tax treaties, ‘geopolitical sandwiches’ and BRIC false investments. All painting a rather deft, abstract and fastidious multitude of surreptitious financial smoke-screening. Stark evidence of the seedy and prosaic reality behind filtering your US corporate-capital through an Amsterdam-based radical vegan egg-painting charity called Alpha Yankee Doodle.

Following up from this project came a wish to cognitively map this process of tax avoidance for the everyday subject. Herregraven’s 2013 work, an online video-game called Taxodus, gave the player a chance to embody their favourite multi-national, using live statistics, tax treaties and national tax policies to circumvent their capital across the globe in a game to save as much profit as possible. This online-game, as well as later projects like Liquid Citizenship (2015) – a similar project where you are given an arbitrary national identity and net-worth, and proceed to – using real time statistics – browse your various options of buying citizenship across the globe, and where not possible, your ulterior, shadier options – are both novel attempts by Herregraven to meet the calls of thinkers such as Nick Srnicek, as he outlines the revolutionary necessity of “a navigational medium for making intelligible the dynamics of global capitalism.”[1]

Taxodus, 2013 

Liquid Citizenship, 2015 

More recently, however, Herregraven’s work has become more speculative. In both Malleable Regress (2016) and her ongoing project, Sprawling Swamps (2016 -), Herregraven visualises a fictional scenario, where the interstitial cracks of contemporary legislative and financial borders – ice sheets, waves, swamps, shorelines that drift from one place to another – are populated by futuristic, amphibian microplatforms – Test Den, Swamp of Forked Tongues, Bootleg Tribunal for Nonhumans, Empty Cache; Alpha 1, 2, 3, 4. Platforms established strategically in order to wire-up an ‘optimal high-speed planetary-scale trading infrastructure.’

In her work Malleable Regress, Herregraven has crafted a series of 10 polyurethane-rubber tiles from this digital world, each carrying its own microplatform brand indentity. These moulds are taken from the strange appearance of across UK and EU shores over the last few years, of Tjipetir gutta-percha tiles: slabs of tree-gum made on Indonesian plantations in the late 19th century for the production of the worlds first telegraph cables – the same veins of trade and communication that dominate and structure contemporary finance (it is no coincidence that imperial colonies are the major breeding ground for tax havens). This eerie embodiment fills the objects with the ghosts of failed infrastructures and collapsed worlds, pushing our imagination to the next shift-change in speculative finance. A change with which the majority of us aren’t likely to even witness.


http://femkeherregraven.net/

Look here for Herregraven’s TEDxVaduz talk on her project Geographies of Avoidance.

[1] Nick Srnicek, ‘Accelerationism – ‘Epistemic, Economic, Political’ in Speculative Aesthetics, ed. Robin Macaky et al. (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014): 53.

An Experiment in the Sonic Aesthetics of Data

For us now time has all but disappeared. We are a generation and a world for whom time exists in the form of an imperceptible code; an infinite matrix of pre-sliced microbytes, manifested in a vivid acidity of light and data. Our contemporary sublime oscillates from nanobytes to fibre-optics, from the molecular to the cosmic. Glitches and convulsions stretch and pierce its fabric, corrupted .jpegs arriving in an endless alphanumerical code. The circulation and flows of information that coarse their way through the world’s silicon veins have produced not only a new ecology of signs, but a radically transfigured textuality.

The dehumanising nature of this post-phenomenological world — a frenzy of electrical signals, subatomic waves and quantum particles; of bleeps, blips and drones — has left many reduced to the anxieties and paranoia of a fully-fledged 21st century technological alienation. It is in this context that one of Japan’s leading electronic-music composers and visual artists, Ryoji Ikeda, is demonstrating his unique conceptual and aesthetic drive, executed with a high-tech and mathematical precision.

Ikeda’s oeuvre has weaved between science, art, mathematics, music and more. Back in 1993 he became involved with Dump Type, an experimental Japanese theatre collective. Coming from a rather more pragmatist background in Microeconomics, this association radically accelerated Ikeda’s artistic sensibility as he produced mesmerising sound work for their provocative performances, a series of projects which became embryonic of what he would later pursue in his solo work.

After immersing himself further as a DJ in the Japanese techno scene of the 90s and fully acquainting himself with the new affects and aesthetic states that advances in technology were engendering, Ikeda went on to create album after album of daring, complex and challenging music: his 2001 release Matrix, a fragile and elegant ambient work which vacillates from the intensities of zero to infinity, was composed entirely of singular, pure sinewaves. At the same time producing large-scale artworks such as Spectra(2000), an immense declaration of the sublimity of light and sound that has toured the world, morphing and recontextualising itself in every site-specific location. It’s installation at Terminal 5, JFK International was as if it had been snake-charmed from Kubrick’s hypnotic unconscious itself.

“The installation offers visitors a special phenomenon. It is nearly invisible due to its intense brightness and inaudible due to its ultra-frequencies. Visitors can barely recognise the dimensions of the space, as if they were blind in a whiteout state. As they pass through the corridor, subtle oscillation patterns occur around their ears, caused by their own movements interfering with the sounds. The sound is subtle and minimal, yet the experience of the sound in the installation is active and dynamic.”

 

Ryoji Ikeda’s Spectra installed at Terminal 5, JFK International (2004)

This September Ikeda will be performing a live rendering of his 2008 album Test Pattern – from which this disclaimer is taken:

“Caution! This CD contains specific waveform, impulse and burst data that perform a response test for loudspeakers and headphones. High volume listening of the last track may cause damage to equipment and eardrums.”

– at the Old Selfridges Hotel in London. In association with the Barbican Ikeda will perform one of his notorious audiovisual experiments into the materiality and aesthetics of data, information and contemporary technology; an alien composition of machinic pulses and sonic modulations, at times barely audible, punctuated by electronic resonances and bursts of white noise, encased within a ceaseless black and white strobe of gltiching data. The deeply synchronised work is a pyscho-aural investigation into the larger effects of information-technologies and Big Data in our contemporary understanding of both reality and subjectivity, and is best avoided if your sensory-receptor threshold is located anywhere beneath the absolute human maxim.

 

Ikeda performing is album Test Pattern in 2008.

Created through an intricate and complex process, Ikeda uses a ‘cross platform conversion system’ to transform various media sources — textual, auditory, visual — into a raw barcode, which is then further deconstructed into mathematical data and computer binary-code, to be reappropriated back into dataphonic audio content; a catalogue of disparate frequencies and intensities, emptied of their original content and meaning, reconstituted in a sublime sonic mosaic. Works like Test Pattern explore a spectrum of extreme affective states, from the muted and deft loneliness of a single sinewave traversing our neurosomatic registers, to the nauseating artillery of piercing white noise, occasionally gliding into the faintest lacings of sculpted techno melodies.

The music, or ‘non-music’, is simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic. It transports us into the eerie, imperceptible substratum of the contemporary infosphere. One populated by “frozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales fitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesizers [and] audience analysers”, and brings it to life with the same fierce energy that propels the cataclysmic world of protons, electrons and neurons that is subsides in. Ikeda reconfigures the work’s own hyper-decontextualisation, repurposing the void of raw data into a daring articulation of life beyond human perception. It is a manifesto for survival in a world slowly drowning itself in anti-mnemonic ecstasy.