IN CONVERSATION WITH THOMSON & CRAIGHEAD |
Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead are fascinated by how global communications networks like the web are transforming the way we all perceive and understand the world around us. They live and work in London and Kingussie in the highlands of Scotland and make artworks for galleries, online and sometimes outdoors. INTRODUCING talks to Thomson & Craighead about their artistic practice - the worldwide web, the inevitable label of ‘digital artists’, online resource and authorship, their latest projects and the upcoming solo exhibition at the Highland Institute of Contemporary Art.
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INTRODUCING: A lot of your work involves sourcing materials from the worldwide web. We'd assume that a lot of your practice is devoted in the sourcing and categorising of online data. How does that affect your practice? Are your ideas somehow affected or determined by this aspect of your practice? THOMSON & CRAIGHEAD: Our background as artists comes via a pretty traditional art school route; we began drawing and painting but went on to use video during the very early nineties. At that time we were keen to make works that were not obvious commodities. Like now, it was a recession back then and there wasn't very much at stake, and so it seemed an engaging way to make work, one that slipped through the fingers of the somewhat conservative art world establishment. We were able to carry works on videotapes in hand luggage to different countries and just talk to people about what we were all showing each other and not worry about editions, sales, shipping costs, press releases etc. Not exactly a business plan we know, but it felt liberating at the time. As the internet emerged into wide usage around 1994 with the release of the first popular web browsers, we saw opportunities to extend this practice into this globally networked environment. These days we find ourselves overlapping a bit more with the mainstream art world, but we’ve remained interested in how new communications technologies (like the web) are altering the way we all perceive and understand the world around us. It may not be blatantly obvious but we still think of our practice as having a strong relationship with drawing and video, and in general terms we would suggest we are trying to scrutinize a moment of significant technological change we happen to be living through, much as artists in the early twentieth century had to deal with the emergence of film and photography.
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INTRODUCING: What is it about worldwide web that fascinates you so much? I: Do you only make art as Thomson and Craighead? Can you tell us more about the working relationship between the two of you? T & C: Everything we make as artists is part of our collaborative practice, although when we began working together we did do things separately having just graduated from Art school. More often than not we found we were competing for the same exhibition opportunities in those early days, but at the expense of one or other of us and so one reason for beginning our collaboration was just to take that competitive element away, and we were doing so much to help each other make new work in any case. Very quickly we shared skills and everything blurred. Now we honestly couldn’t tell you where our respective input begins or ends.
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I: Do you ever find it limiting that the internet always has to be the base of every project? Do you feel if you made something outside this concern (the internet) it wouldn’t be Thomson and Craighead anymore? T & C: That’s a difficult question to answer succinctly. In our minds, we don’t make work that’s only web-based even though some may perceive us that way. A recent example would be a series of printouts of lie detector reports testing speaking clocks that we showed at SPACE Gallery, London as part of Sound Escapes exhibition in July 2009. Other examples would include a generative musical work we made a couple of years ago called Diminished 7th, where a series of tuned bells are performed by a small flock of sheep. Or straightforward video installations like Obituary and Shopping or even our computer game Triggerhappy. We are currently developing new work for a solo exhibition in June 2010 at the Highland Institute of Contemporary Art in Inverness-shire and none of these pieces will have a network connection.
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T & C: However you are right that lots of other things we have made, either refer to the culture of the web (our Google tea towels for example) or simply utilise live information found on the web (Decorative Newsfeeds, Light from Tomorrow or Horizon as examples here). In the case of live digital information like news headlines or Weather information or live web cams, we are actually more interested in the material qualities of the data itself than its provenance online, and pulling this information from the web is as much about convenience as anything. The tricky thing about the internet though, is that it’s just not been around for a very long time, and sometimes an artwork that might use the net in some way is at risk of being overly determined as such by others. This is amplified further in our particular case because we became interested in the worldwide web and internet relatively early on, and we think that’s one of the reasons why there are some who refer to us as ‘digital artists’ or ‘new media artists’. We prefer ‘artists’ but people seem naturally to want to pigeonhole artists for some reason: it’s an age-old problem and we just try and carry on making work that engages us regardless. As the internet and the general ubiquity of computing becomes more and more ingrained into every aspect of our daily lives, we think people will become less inclined simply to describe art that might utilize computers or the internet as ‘computer art’ or ‘internet art’ –it will just cease to be practical nomenclature because so much of everything will incorporate these technologies as a matter of course.
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I: Take A short film about War and Flat Earth as examples, is the creative or editing process determined or limited by the source materials? Does the sense of 'authorship' weaken or does it come through in the editing process? T & C: That's an interesting question and in a way we are asking the very same thing by making these narrative documentary artworks in the first place. We only allow ourselves to make these short movies out of stuff (blog extracts, flickr pics etc) that other 'real' people have uploaded and we are constrained further because we try only to use material licensed under Creative Commons (Copyleft) and that makes up a relatively small proportion of what’s out there. Our agency as artists is in the way we bring this material together and so our own authorship emerges from a mélange of other people's experience. One could argue any form of authorship might happen in this way where a brief conversation or a half heard radio broadcast all contribute to an individual's identity and hence what that person might author, it's just not so obvious.
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I: We think it is important that the clips are entirely taken from others off the internet, for it somehow exemplifies the ‘abundance’ and immediacy of online information, which is a huge part of the world we live in. Is it very important for these two pieces in particular to let the process of assembling (especially the fact that the clips are entirely taken from internet) come across to the audience (without the support of textual description)? T & C: Yes that’s what we are aspiring to do and we are using the end credits of each movie in particular, as a way of trying to show the audience how we sourced all this information online. We list all the flickr users’ and blogs we reference and so on at that point. We have to do that in any case as part of the Creative Commons licensing we are observing but it really is an integral part of the works in any case. In both Flat Earth and A short film about War, we are cinematizing a web-browsing experience, and in doing so we are trying to reveal the limits of each respective mode of representation to ourselves and to our audience. In the case of A short film about War, we are currently taking it a step further and developing a second screen which will displays a text dump listing the provenance of every element in the movie as it plays in real time –two quite different representations of the same information played back side by side.
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I: I am amazed by the clips you managed to source in a lot of your video work. Research must be a huge part of your practice… T & C: Well, yes we do spend rather long periods of time just searching and accumulating material when we are preparing these works in particular. For a new streaming video work we just completed for Arts Council England called Several Interruptions, we spent seemingly endless days watching you tube videos of people holding their breath underwater for as long as possible, in the end selecting fifteen sequences out of a possible 61,000!
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