Solo Exhibition

A major solo exhibition of recent work forthcoming in March 2013 to be held at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery in London

Belief

The final documentary in our 'Flat Earth Trilogy' (preceded by 'Flat Earth' (2007), and 'A short film about War' (2009/2010) commissioned by Vital Spark / Creative Scotland and premiered at InSpace Gallery, Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh Film Festival

Image Counter Image

A major group exhibition at Haus Der Kunst Munich looking at how international contemporary artists have visualized conflict and war in recent years. The exhibition included works by nineteen artists with a two hundred page catalogue (ISBN 978-3-86335-208-0) Our work was entitled ‘A short film about war’ –a documentary artwork made entirely from information found online. ‘A short film about war’ has also been exhibited around the world at Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (FACT), Liverpool as part of the touring exhibition ‘My War’ (catalogue 110 pages ISBN 978-3-86828-134-7 | subsequent venue: Edith Russ Haus, Oldenberg); Rotterdam International Film Festival, 2011; Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany, 2011; Rooftop Films, New York, 2011; as part of our solo exhibition at Watermaal Station in Brussels, Belgium 2011; for Recontres Internationales, Centre Pompidou/Gaîté Lyrique, Paris and touring to Madrid and Berlin 2011/2012; and as part of our nomination for the Samsung Art Prize, BFI Southbank, London, 2012

Life Online (open source)

Life Online is a major new gallery at the National Media Museum, UK. Four artists were commissioned specially to produce works for the launch of the Life Online Galleries. Our work, ‘A live portrait of Tim Berners-Lee (an early warning system)’ is installed for close to a year in the museum.

Time Landscapes

Time Landscapes is an exhibition of online work curated by Beryl Graham for Electronic Village Galleries: New media is often assumed to be the antithesis of all that is rural or natural – a quick and shallow ‘virtual reality’ for city slickers, which doesn’t even approach feeling the sea spray on your face, or just ‘being there’. Yet, there many layers of artificiality and man-made intervention lurking in the landscape – is that coastline restricted by the military? Is that woodland ancient semi-natural, or carefully sculpted for clients owning a country estate? Are those seaside watercolours and those photographs of farmhouse Bed and Breakfasts carefully editing out any sign of modern functionality, such as the electricity pylons? When it comes to art, new media artists still have a strong interest in landscape, and are able to use the characteristics of new media to reveal different layers of reality. This includes those layers which are not visible to the naked eye, and might be expressed as data – for example layers of numbers concerning invisible pollution, appearing as the glitches in landscape images. The connected nature and global reach of the internet also enables the artists here to play with time and space: Pollution is monitored live in real time; from a village in Cornwall, you can see the temperatures in all corners of the globe, right at that moment. Being ‘live on the internet’ does not of course always mean huge speed: these Harewood landscapes are drawn more slowly than a watercolour, and the contemplation of Pico Mirador national park unfolds to the leisurely pace of webcam refresh rates. Take a seat at a screen, and contemplate the sublime mass of data that is the internet … Electronic Village Galleries is a pilot project developed by Kate Southworth for distributed local and village sites in rural Cornwall.

Several Interruptions: 15 Years of the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art

Seven, sequential solo presentations to celebrate 15 years of the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art in 2011. Exhibited: 'Each Long Second' 2006, A0 photocopies, tape. Dimensions: 880 X 850 cms.

Thomson & Craighead (Solo exhibition)

An exhibition of new work by Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead. Installations exhibited; 'The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order', 'Flipped Clock', 'Nearby, within 5 miles', 'The End', 'Horizon (Print)' Book publication pending expected to be published in 2011

The City & The Stars

The inaugural film lounge programme at Stills Gallery screening a group of time-based artworks that deal with city, memory, and networks. For this exhibition Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead showed their desktop documentary Flat Earth

They do things differently here (BEACON)

The graduating degree exhibition for curating MA students at Edinburgh College of Art

Urban Video Project (Several Interruptions)

The large-scale presentation of 'Several Interruptions' on the side of a high rise building in Syracuse, New York

London Wall: Museum of London

A special commission for the relaunch of the Museum of London's new collections.

Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs

A group exhibition of predominantly sound works responding to the tape experiments of William Burroughs

London Wall

A special commission for the re-launch of Museum of London in Summer 2010, comprising over 500 fly posters produced by an improvised printing studio representing social media traffic within a three-mile radius of the museum as a large-scale performative poem. The folio of flyposters has been acquired into the Museum’s permanent collection as a social historical record marking early period of online social networking. According to Museum of London visitor statistics, 280727 people visited our artwork during a five-month period. Although the exhibition ran officially to 5th September 2010, it was extended until the end of October by popular demand. The work has subsequently been exhibited as part of a solo exhibition at Highland institute of Contemporary Art, Inverness-shire in 2010 (catalogue 42 pages ISBN 978-0-9532175-3-3); in Tallinn, Estonia at Kumu Art Museum as part of the major group exhibition ‘Gateways’ in 2011 (catalogue 261 pages ISBN 978-3-7757-2796-9); and then in 2012 at Furtherfield gallery, London for their inaugural exhibition ‘Being Social’

Subjective Projections (Flat Earth)

A presentation of 'Flat Earth' as part of a series of solo presentations simultaneously online and in the gallery under the umbrella title, 'Subjective Projections'

MyWar (A short film about War)

A group exhibition of international artist making work that responds to war

Trust in the Age of Lonliness (Decorative Newsfeeds)

A group exhibition of work held in the British Council Collection at British Council Offices, London

A short film about War (Solo presentation)

A solo presentation of 'A short film about War' on Animate Projects website, with a contextual essay by Lisa LeFeuvre

How We Became Metadata

What is Metadata? As the exhibition outlines, it is data about data, information about information. It facilitates the retrieval, use, and mis-use of data, information, and knowledge. It is at the heart of our age: it underpins, drives, and shapes information economies, societal networks, search engines, communication technologies, systems of knowledge, websites, online images, maps, archives, catalogues and indexes, stock markets, and especially capitalism, commerce, and consumption. It is the structure, the organizing principle, the ecology that governs us. Metadata shapes experience – through data, information, knowledge. It shapes our sense of privacy, identity, security, civic-ness, labour, sharing, peer to peer-ness, being together, and being itself even. It shapes who we are and what we are. In the past, we used to shape data and information. Now it’s shaping us. It trawls through our searches, monitors our buying habits, its GPS systems tracking us, its cookies shadowing us, tagging us, accumulating data and information along the way, for its own sake, for purposes ominous or as yet unanticipated, even earning capital off the back of our labour as we manage our Facebook sites, all the while accumulating, number-crunching, processing, and then offering our desires back to us. Threefold. Buying a book on Amazon? ‘Customers who bought items in your Recent History also bought…’ In this exhibition the artists locate and challenge the logic, the status, and the nature of data, information, and knowledge. By way of the informational (Callanan), the communicable (Han), the environmental/ecological (Corby & Baily and Mackenzie), the bio-cultural (Kac), the searchable (Thomson and Craighead), the historical (lok), and the archival as itself a mechanical super-structure of data (Maclennan and Orlow), they find new and unique languages to articulate visually and poetically how such systems and networks of data/information/knowledge that constitute and are constituted by metadata might be brought to light, questioned, and, perhaps most pressingly, how they might be disrupted. ‘How We Became Metadata’ is a political and ethical move in that direction: it is a move to highlight the creation, organization, presentation, and control of data and metadata, and, even more so, to interrupt the rhythm of such insidious logic.

We are Time: Seven Installations (Horizon)

Several Interruptions (Solo commission)

A special commission for the relaunch of the Arts Council England website

Landscape 2.0 (Flat Earth)

How do we perceive landscapes? As real and preferably undisturbed nature? As a real but totally constructed reality or as a digital fantasy world? What can and should the landscape accomplish today? And what visions are there about its future? The exhibition Landscape 2.0 juxtaposes romantic yearnings and emotions with the demands of a modern globalised world and its guiding principles. It concerns a contemporary exploration of the subject matter of the landscape and its importance in the present day. The significance of the landscape is permanently subject to an historic transformation that is influenced by social, ideological and technical changes. Landscape as an artistic representation was simultaneously always an inventory of the respective discourse regarding nature and its importance in peoples’ lives. A new relationship to our surroundings has resulted from the increasing virtualisation of our world. Now that it has become navigable, predictable and thus manipulable in various ways, the shaped and constructed landscape functions like a catalogue of interpretations of nature, of society, of the economy or culture. The artists participating in the exhibition have developed various strategies of dealing with this complex subject matter.

Sound Escapes (A universal machine for testing everything)

Peter Cusack, Simon Elvins, Fédération Internationale des Chasseurs de Sons, Nikolaus Gansterer, Stephen Gill, Dan Holdsworth, Jacob Kirkegaard, Camille Norment, Dawn Scarfe, Thomson & Craighead Sound Escapes examines the very nature of sound. Why is one person’s disturbing noise another’s intriguing sonic landscape? In what ways are our emotions affected by sound? Are plants affected by music? Can you hear a photograph? Do ears make their own sounds? Does the microphone never lie? These are just some questions explored by the works on show. Curated by Angus Carlyle and Irene Revell; produced by Electra To watch a video with the Curators click here The exhibition marks the culmination of an extensive interdisciplinary research project that has coupled artists with acousticians, engineers, and social scientists across the UK to explore how we can move beyond negative noise towards the idea of positive soundscapes. Posters illustrating the findings of this research – scans of the brain, measurements of the heart and the lungs, maps of city sound-walks and representations of the choices people make when thinking and talking about sound - are also hung on the gallery walls. Thomson & Craighead’s new work A universal machine for testing everything invites visitors to the gallery to make outgoing calls using a telephone line connected to a commercially available lie detector. Alongside the telephone and pinned to the wall are test reports documenting previous calls the artists made to a series of speaking clocks while traveling in the UK and abroad. The work is a playful engagement with the notion of speech intelligibility but also a statement of the ultimate futility of any mathematical algorithm to read the emotional affect of sound. Nikolaus Gansterer’s piece, The Eden Experiment, also plays with the inherent subjectivity of the listening experience, in setting out the laboratory conditions in which two mouse ear cress plants are subjected to Bach and ‘heavy metal’ respectively during the course of the exhibition, all other parameters of the plants’ treatment being equal. By contrast, Dan Holdsworth’s No Echo is a series of large-scale photographic works of anechoic chambers, and presents an almost voyeuristic glimpse of these eerily arcane environments. Peter Cusack’s Soundscape Sequencer, the main artistic commission from the research project itself, allows visitors to mix surround sound into their own sonic panorama based on field recordings from different cities around the world. Using noise pollution statistics from DEFRA, Simon Elvins’ Silent London shows a contoured landscape of the quietest parts of the city. Camille Norment’s work Driveby gives the visitor a phantom impression of a car driving past outside the gallery, through a physical experience transmitted at low frequencies from a gallery window, with a heavy bass giving the impression of an exaggerated onboard speaker system. In an examination of the listening process itself, Jacob Kirkegaard’s work Labyrinthitis is a ceiling mounted installation of a series of 16 helicoidally spaced speakers, mimicking the shape of the inner ear. These speakers emit tones which trigger ‘otoacoustic emissions’ – a little known phenomenon where the ear itself resonates sound. If subjected to the right combination of frequencies the inner ear vibrates and emits sound. The tones making up Labyrinthitis are recorded otoaccoustic emissions from Kirkegaard’s own ears, which he has composed i

They told you so (Four lie detector reports)

THEY TOLD YOU SO July 16 - Aug 14, 2009 featuring John Menick, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Roee Rosen, Thomson & Craighead, and Brina Thurston curated by Mireille Bourgeois and Anaïs Lellouche bitforms gallery, 529 West 20th Street, NYC Gallery Hours: Monday - Friday, 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM Opening Reception: Thursday, July 16, 6:00 - 8:30 PM bitforms gallery is pleased to announce They Told You So, an exhibition curated by Mireille Bourgeois and Anais Lellouche. The exhibition will run Thursday, July 16st through August 14th, 2009. The group exhibition They Told You So gathers work by international artists: Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, John Menick, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Roee Rosen, and Brina Thurston. The works selected in the exhibition share a process akin to what the Situationists International have referred to as détournement; a term that implies a reuse of well known media to deliver a message opposed to the original. The artworks gathered have studied a very specific form of rhetoric, one shaped and disseminated as a tool for the political and economic industries. The artworks in They Told You So invert, expand, and parody the rhetoric of power. The artworks reveal the tropes of rhetoric by deconstructing its cliché yet widely spread mechanical apparatus, from lie detectors to surveillance cameras, and investigate some of its psychological methods, such as brainwashing and the use of subliminal messages. They present an industrious tension of skepticism and cognitive desire to mimic and channel the numerous forms of language manipulations that we endure from political and corporate powers daily. The works, via video, sound installation and printed text, capture the successes and shortcomings of linguistics and its means of interpretation. Evaluating the authenticity of the recorded voice as a mechanical source of reliable knowledge, artists Thomson & Craighead have subjected a series of telephone speaking clocks to lie detector tests. In Five lie detector reports (2000-2005) most of the speaking clocks are deemed suspect or untruthful, highlighting the absurdity of these two examples of authoritative technologies. Embedded within multiple layers, language also takes on secret meanings in John Menick's specially commissioned work, The Subliminal Projection Company (2009). This series of audio CDs Vol. 1-4, uses various soothing sounds of nature to lure the listener into a state of relaxation. Experimenting with subliminal techniques, Menick aims to translate a selection of his most intimate memories into the unconscious of the listener. The artist will also exhibit a single drawing from a series entitled How to Tell a Story (2009) based on a writing manuals often used for screenplays and novels. The drawing points to an ostensibly systematic creativity shaped by the guidance of an emotionless and uncritical tool. In Live to Tell (2002) Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay exposes his private performance of the musical hit by Madonna, the queen of pop and gay icon, and positions the viewer as voyeur. Replicating the action in multiple locations, the performances are synchronized in a compilation of security camera footage that inverts the psychological associations of security cameras as tools of repression into ones of free expression and identity politics. A self-stated adorable child is possessed by evil in Confessions Coming Soon (2007) by Roee Rosen and subjected to deliver messages in a language he does not understand. He ann

ARCO International Contemporary Art Fair 2009 (Unprepared Piano)

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2009 (Flat Earth)

Screening of the short documentary film Flat Earth as part of the group screening entitled Nanoland at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Screening times: 22.01.09 at 22.30hrs and 26.01.09 at 14.00 hrs. http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/en/film.aspx?ID=f9ad76fc-da3a-4b4f-a1bf-79681db28d5b

Timecode (BEACON & Horizon)

Each artist in the exhibition has an obsession with marking time but have very different ways of expressing this – live web streams, wallpaper, lumps of coal, lava medallions, digital code alongside more traditional, yet still idiosyncratic and highly personal approaches – graphite, watercolour and oil paint. "'Timecode' is a show that marks time in both the sense of celebrating ten years of productive work; and also of pausing for thought. It is in-between time. This is appropriate: it generates a sense of anticipation that time will start again soon, and that what happens next is the most important thing" Art Monthly review of Timecode written by Martin Vincent. Timecode brings together internationally revered artists (Douglas Gordon, On Kawara), alongside artists at an earlier stage in their career (Graham Dolphin, Ilana Halperin).The works all express the passing of time in very different ways. From Christian Stock’s blocks of paint, painstakingly built up over the course of several months to Thomson & Craighead’s new media work which shows webcam views from all the world’s timezones and transmits them live in to the gallery projected on the wall. The exhibition is accompanied by a selection of talks and events and a specially selected film programme for the DCA cinema including Mike Figgis’s groundbreaking Timecode and a double bill of Chris Marker’s seminal La Jetee and Sans Soleil. Special limited edition prints, made at DCA, by Thomson & Craighead and Graham Dolphin, have been commissioned to coincide with the exhibition and will be on display in DCA’s Print Space.

Friends of the Divided Mind (BEACON)

A group exhibition curated by the graduating MA students on MA Curating at Royal Collage of Art, London

English Lounge (Flat Earth)

A group exhibition of work by British Artists curated by Katie Hill

Flicker (Decorative Newsfeeds)

A group exhibition of works held in the British Council Collection

Thomson and Craighead (Decorative Newsfeeds & BEACON)

A solo exhibition of work in the project space at Moderna Museet specially curated to accompany the Max Ernst retrospective

Untethered: A sculpture garden of readymades

Jessica Banks, Ayah Bdeir, Michel de Broin, Max Dean, Paul DeMarinis, Kelly Dobson, Germaine Koh, JooYoun Paek, Sascha Pohflepp, Hans-Christoph Steiner, Thomson & Craighead, Nor_/d (Addie Wagenknecht and Stefan Hechenberger) and Joe Winter, curated by visiting fellow Sarah Cook New York City, September 5, 2008-Eyebeam is pleased to announce Untethered, a sculpture garden of everyday objects deprogrammed of their original function, embedded with new intelligence and transformed into surrealist and surprising readymades, including a photocopier that reads the night sky; a PDA turned guitar; and a piano that plays the Internet. The exhibition features pieces by 15 artists working at the intersection of art and technology, including current and former Eyebeam residents and fellows, as well as leading international artists. Untethered opens September 25 and runs through October 25, and is accompanied by a downloadable audio guide (available at www.eyebeam.org). Sarah Cook, the exhibition’s curator, cites the art-historical discourse on readymades, and current ideas concerning the designed obsolescence-or shelf life-of consumable technologies as her inspiration for the show. “The idea of the readymade hinges on a mysterious quality of displacement, wherein objects are not just decontextualized, but actually transplanted from one realm of experience to another,” Cook said. “In researching the work of Eyebeam’s resident artists I read [MoMA curator] Margit Rowell’s writing on the readymade and identified a link to contemporary “hacks” and instances where artists have deprogrammed technological objects in order to create a kind of magical experience for the viewer." This “otherworldly” aesthetic is evident in the works on view, such as in Michel de Broin’s sculpture Dead Star (2008), an inert asteroid of nearly depleted batteries, and Joe Winter’s Xerox Astronomy (2008), in which a generic photocopier and desk lamp are transformed into elements within the cosmic system used by an imagined observer. Additionally, as a show of objects that have been tinkered with, invented, and allowed to be “generative”, that is, open to experimentation and other use, Untethered presents a deliberate reference to the notion of “tethered appliances” (a term used by Internet scholar Jonathan Zittrain in his book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Yale University Press and Penguin UK, 2008)-technologies, such as iPods or cell phones, that contain proprietary software and are tied to single uses or networks. In this, the exhibition ties into Eyebeam’s recently launched Open Culture Research Group, a forum for the investigation of free and open source software and hardware. Both displaced and in some cases deprogrammed, the pieces in Untethered ask us why we understand some things as useful hardware and other things not. For instance, how does an inflated garbage bag become a way to disguise your bike, as in JooYoun Paek’s Not Bicycle Cover (2008)? Neither prototypes nor edgy products, the works in the exhibition will surely invite conversation on the semantic barriers between the worlds of art, design and technology.

Social Networking Unplugged

Futuresonic presents a sideways and playful look at social networking - for five days and nights Manchester will be the most sociable city on the planet as the city centre is overrun with ‘unplugged’ social networking. The first major art exhibition to present a comprehensive and creative look at social networking, featuring a major conference plus 20 world premieres, UK firsts and commissions from an array of international artists connecting this theme to Futuresonic’s long standing focus on presenting social and participatory artworks in unexpected city spaces. Forming the centrepiece of the exhibition, located in CUBE on Portland Street at the midway point between the city-centre festival sites and the main music and conference venues on Oxford Road, is an exhibition of artworks exploring the social networking unplugged theme. CUBE exhibition runs until 17 May.

The New Normal (BEACON)

T!h!e! !N!e!w! !N!o!r!m!a!l. ! !A!r!t!i!s!t!s! !S!p!a!c!e!,! !3!8! !G!r!e!e!n!e! !S!t!r!e!e!t!,! !N!e!w! !Y!o!r!k!.! ! 25.04.2008 – 21.06.2008 (Catalogue 72 pages) (Touring to: Huarte Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Huarte, Spain. 04.07.2008 – 28.09.2008; The Decker Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art Baltimore, Maryland. 06.11.2008 – 19.12.2008; Bureau for Open Culture, Columbus College of Art & Design Columbus, Ohio. 25.02.2009 – 25.04.2009; Pomona College Museum of Art Claremont, California. 25.09.2009 – 19.10.2009; Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario, Canada 09.04.2010 – 04.07.2010)

AV Festival (Flat Earth)

Animate Projects show a selection of their films in a portable cinema during the AV Festival 2008 in Newcastle

01SJ Future Films (Flat Earth)

A special film screening as part of the Zero One festival in San Jose, California

Multichannel (Flat Earth)

Multichannel is a screening programme of artists film and video, organised and curated by ArtSway and SCAN in ArtSway’s galleries. This year’s programme features film and video works by national and international artists and looks to develop the highly successful 2007 Multichannel screening programme. The continuing intention of the curators is to present single screen video works by artists and practitioners who reflect current trends in contemporary lens-based work, as well as screening films by cutting edge practitioners from the previous two decades. Multichannel has been expanded from the three days of screenings in 2007, to almost three weeks for this year’s programme. In addition, there was an open call for artists to submit work for selection – resulting in 150 high-calibre lens-based artists sending works from across the UK, Europe and as far afield as the United States. Alongside the open call a number of exceptional artists have been invited by the curators to exhibit their work. The single channel works selected for Multichannel are curated into a screening programme that will cover the following areas: Film/Video and Music; Narrative and Journey; Film/Video as Material; Psychological Narrative. The 35 artists included in the programme have been grouped into an area that the curators feel best reflects themes inherent in their work, and are as follows: Artists Exhibiting in ArtSway’s Gallery 2: Film/Video and Music: Ranulph & Severi Glanville; Andrew Brand; Anahita Hekmat; Pete Gomes; Jen-Kuang Chang; Alison Ballard; Paul B Davis; Rachel Cattle & Steve Richards; Flow Motion. Narrative and Journey: Steve Hines; Michael Fortune; Jeannie Driver; Keyvan Gharaee Nezhad; David Kendall & Marina Loeb; David Bickerstaff; Thomson & Craighead; Gair Dunlop; Kevin Logan; Nina Sverdvik; Amanda Loomes, Manuel Saiz; John Davis. Artists Exhibiting in ArtSway’s Gallery 3: Film/Video as Material: Nicola Naismith; Cynthia Beth Rubin & Bob Gluck; Karen Reed; Joe Duffy; Simon Woolham. Psychological Narrative: Hannu Karjailainen; Anna Siebert; Lucy Cash; Tina Gonsalves; Sarah Pucill; Joel Papps; Kevin Pocock; Jordan Baseman; Benjamin Cooper. Artist in Residence and Education Programme: Alongside the screening programme there will be a number of talks and events. Paul B. Davis, an artist and musician with an international reputation for his work reconfiguring video and computer games, will also be in residence for one week during Multichannel as part of the Distributed South media arts initiative curated by Space Media and SCAN. Paul will spend part of his residency teaching local school children from St Luke’s Primary, Sway, the basics of computer programming and electronics.

SOHO Shorts (Flat Earth)

Soho shorts is the London Festival of short films.

Video Vortex II (Decorative Newsfeeds)

Video Vortex.2 From 08-12-2007 until 03-02-2008 Johan Grimonprez & Charlotte Léouzon, Martijn Hendriks, Jaap de Jonge, Meta.Live.Nu presents DFM RTV INT, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Oog Volkskrant Online, Park 4DTV, Rabotnik, Sonic()bject, Martin Takken, Thomson & Craighead Video Vortex.2 is a sequel to the Video Vortex exhibition that responded to the Web2.0 phenomenon. Web2.0 stands for power to the user and democracy for everyone. It has led to innovative forms of media use in which open and friendly cooperation stimulates critical reflection and new ideas. In Video Vortex.2 attention is given to a different side of the democratic movement. How are artists reacting to this democratization process? To what extent does the democratic movement in Web 2.0 differ from previous utopias around radio and television? How can artists retain their autonomy and diversity outside the mass media? Is the esthetic of amateurism the new genre? Once again, artists will be responding to Web2.0, with special attention this time being given to the situation in The Netherlands and Belgium. Growing out of the desire to do one's own things in a space one annexed for oneself, in the early 1980s various initiatives arose in Amsterdam that focused on making and exhibiting images and sound. Art, politics and media came together for the first time. Alas, it was not long before the coherence and mutual solidarity were lost, but the tone had been set and a great deal of effort had been put into dynamic and socially and culturally subversive radio and television broadcasts.

Multiplicities (Google tea-towels)

BEACON at FACT, Liverpool

The Lost O (Diminished Seventh)

Accumulated Outlook (Decorative Newsfeeds)

Accumulated Outlook examines the way we look at the world through information that is both sourced and sampled. Like the companion exhibition Outlook Express(ed) at Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens, this exhibition explores the way in which artists collect material. It shows how their creativity is evidenced through the act of collecting, as well as through the way they re-use the material. The artists in this exhibition reflect upon the way that information is available to us through an extraordinarily disparate range of sources, and increasingly through electronic media, such as the Internet. They suggest to us that in a world of visual saturation there are ways to personalize things that otherwise seem random, fleeting or incidental. They also show how, by taking an image, or information, from one source and re-using it, they can completely change its meaning, and how we respond to it as viewers. Impossible Landscapes by Dara Gellman and Leslie Peters presents an extra-ordinary space that is both haunting and emotionally charged. Weaving together clips from films and documentaries, the artists take the audience on a tour through a landscape of dark foreboding spaces to breathtaking fly-overs that cross strange terrains. They stitch together work from different genres so that the landscape work seems like something we have encountered before, but which is also oddly unfamiliar and disjointed. Decorative Newsfeeds by Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead uses text sampled live from the Internet. It selects data from the plethora of news information online by tapping into news sites and then presents it in a form that is visually enticing. A dancing ribbon of text unfolds, twirls and cavorts across the screen. The piece becomes a momentary, ever changing, performance. It also reminds us that even data that we might think of as 'straight information' reflects hidden cultural sensibilities. Cheryl Sourke's Homecammer is a series of prints based on images drawn from online community Websites. Webcam images from these community sites show people night and day at their computers, or offer a glimpse of domestic or work spaces, whatever the Webcam is pointed towards. Many seem intentional but some are apparently unintentional. Sourkes extracts still images from the Web, enhances and prints them. The process bestows on the anonymous and often mundane images an intensity and significance that is fascinatingly at odds with the subject. One of the distinctive qualities of the art works in this exhibition is that they demonstrate how narratives can be created from otherwise unrelated material. These narratives are created by the artists exploring and re-inventing information, then accumulating and building connections. One aspect of this is that the artists are giving a personal slant to the work, creating a new layer of meaning and a new visual aesthetic. But there is another aspect to the notion of narrative that is a more abstract one. It is achieved by taking the source material out of context, and relying on the audience to deal with the resultant strange dislocation. Although these works are not at all interactive the audience's perception is crucial. It is the response to the aggregation of contexts that imbues the artworks with an intensity the original material could never have had.

My own private reality (BEACON)

BEACON at BFI, Southbank

This major new work was made as part of a small ahrc grant for the creative and performing arts. It was premiered at BFI Southbank as a solo exhibition

Feedback (Short films about Flying)

there is a catalogue for this exhibition. FEEDBACK focuses on art responsive to instructions, input, or its environment and creates one possible narrative of the multi-faceted histories of art that uses digital technologies as a medium. FEEDBACK interweaves two themes relating to responsive art. One theme traces the concept of feedback from art based on instructions—be they natural language or code—to art that sets up open systems reacting to input from its immediate environment or the Internet. A second theme explores the concept of light and the moving object and image from Kinetic Art and Op Art to responsive notions of television and cinema. FEEDBACK links these themes in order to illuminate how different artistic practices developed over the past 50 years are interconnected and have informed each other. The exhibition is not a historical survey but features a selection of pieces that underscore how related ideas have been expressed at different points in time. Artworks are not presented in chronological order but in thematic groups or pairs that branch and connect.

Digital Aesthetic II

The Digital Aesthetic 2 exhibition highlights work by a number of regional, national and international artists that use different approaches to working with the digital. Artwork on display will vary from specially commissioned site specific light boxes by Bill Seaman, web based interactives by Thomson and Craighead and boredomresearch, installations by Vince Briffa and Stefan Gec, projections by Gary Hill and Robert Cahen and prints by eBoy, Susan Collins and Jane Prophet.

After Neurath: like sailors on the open sea

Faith in Exposure (Decorative Newsfeeds)

Thomson & Craighead (Solo exhibition at Mejan Labs)

The inaugural exhibition of the new Mejan Labs in Stockholm is a solo exhibition of two recent large scale works by artists Thomson & Craighead

Edge Conditions

Faultlines

New Media: Where? (Solo exhibition)

Artbase 101

Rhizome ArtBase 101 surveys salient themes in Internet art, a practice that has flourished in the last ten years. The exhibition presents forty selections from Rhizome.org's online archive of new media art, the ArtBase, which was launched in 1999 and currently holds some 1,500 works by artists from around the world. Featured works are grouped by ten unifying themes and include seminal pieces by early practitioners as well as projects by some of the most pioneering emerging talents working in the field today. Encompassing software, games, moving image and websites, Rhizome ArtBase 101 presents the Internet as a strapping medium that rivals other art forms in its ability to buttress varied critical and formal explorations. Rhizome ArtBase 101 is currently on exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. At the Museum, all 40 works are installed on computers and some have additionally been elaborated into installations. Rhizome Members receive half price admission to the New Museum during the run of the show, June 23rd - September 10th. **Please note that as our membership is constantly fluctuating, we will submit an updated list of our Members to the New Museum admission staff each Friday over the Summer. Practically, this means if you become a Member on Tuesday of a given week, your membership will not be noted at the front desk until the following Monday. For the duration of the exhibition, all 40 works will be available here to the general online public. Many of these works would usually be accessible only to Rhizome Members as they are located within our archives.

Web Biennial

The Web Biennial 2005, the second of the series, is the only international bi-annual contemporary art exhibition/ conference created exclusively for the World Wide Web.

Blur of the Otherworldly

Blur of the Otherworldly presents 25 contemporary artists whose work employs modern communication technologies (photography, film, video, radio, internet, computers) to explore culturally inbred questions / superstitions concerning parallel worlds to our own. Whether it is conspiracy theories of alien invasion or age-old tales of haunted houses, believers and skeptics alike have employed technology to prove or debunk stories of these visitations. We desire otherworldly experiences yet we want proof. Humans are programmed with these sometimes-contradictory impulses. By definition, having proof means that otherworldly experiences are brought into the concrete world of clarity and legibility. But when this happens they are in danger of losing their mystery and power to make us wonder. Much of human culture is a result of this ongoing struggle between our empirical demands and the need for an open-ended universe.

40 artists 40 days

40 Artists, 40 Days is a special project in support of London’s Olympic and Paralympic Bid to bring the Games to Britain in 2012. On Friday 27 May 2005, we began a 40 day cultural countdown to 5 July, the day the International Olympic Committee will choose a city to host the Games of the XXX Olympiad. We believe that city should be London, and in the crucial final phase we want to send out a clear message that Britain’s Olympic Bid is about so much more than a month-long sporting event in the summer of 2012. It is about transformation – the transformation of one entire quarter of our capital city with bold and beautiful sporting venues designed by world-class architects like Zaha Hadid, the creation of innovative new gallery spaces, affordable housing and the largest urban park to be developed in Europe for 150 years. It is about opportunity – an opportunity to showcase a 21st century Britain to the world, rich in 300 cultures and languages and in the enthusiasm, idealism and talent of our youth. And it is about the Arts – celebrating Britain’s great creative energy in a four-year cultural Olympiad that will benefit all kinds of artistic organisations and individuals through increased national and international partnerships and profile. In the final 40 days of the campaign we want to raise awareness of this wider Olympic opportunity, and encourage support for London 2012, by creating a unique countdown calendar that will focus attention on Britain’s exceptional creative talent. We have asked 40 leading artists to provide a work, either original video, music, text, performance or visual art, which will be showcased here on Tate Online as a message of Olympic support, with a new piece being added every day until you can enjoy all 40. The Olympics is a truly visionary movement, and in as much as we in the creative community are all about vision, we believe that we should back it. The project is a collaboration between the London 2012 Olympic Bid team, Premier Partner and Tate Online’s sponsor, BT and ourselves, Tate.

Terror

The purpose of this project is to investigate the concept of, 'Terror' and challenge the conventions attached to the term. Thorugh mainstream media the idea of, 'Terror' has entered the realm of the everyday and is persistently affecting the organisation of both public and private space in the world of post-9-11. At the same time, the large majority of the world's population has never experienced any terror outside the screen. The six works on this screen function as responsed to the present social and mental climate in which individuals are becoming increasingly marked by a politics of fear.

The Passage of Mirage

The 3rd Centre of Attention Art Prize

The Deceleration Project

Pass the Time of Day

Haunted Media

Algorithmic Revolution

A revolution normally lies ahead of us and is heralded with sound and fury. The algorithmic revolution lies behind us and nobody noticed it. That has made it all the more effective – there is no longer any area of social life that has not been touched by algorithms. Over the past 50 years, algorithmic decision-making processes have come very much to the fore as a result of the universal use of computers in all fields of cultural literacy – from architecture to music, from literature to the fine arts and from transport to management. The algorithmic revolution continues the sequencing technology that began with the development of the alphabet and has reached its temporary conclusion with the human genome project. No matter how imperceptible they may be, the changes this revolution has wrought are immense. The revolution might almost be equated with an anthropological turning point, because – a further narcissistic insult [Copernicus, Darwin, Freud] – it wrests the initiative from nature and mankind and replaces it with an automatable inherent law of action. The illusion of sovereign action on the part of the individual and the romantic notion of anthropomorphic decidability are tempered as a result. An algorithm is essentially an instruction consisting of a finite number of rules designed to solve a specific problem. The most familiar use of algorithms is in computer programming. However, algorithms have long played a crucial role elsewhere, too, as creative instruments in music and the fine arts, for instance. Renaissance art books, such as Piero della Francesca’s »De prospectiva pingendi« [c. 1474] and Albrecht Dürer’s illustrated book »Instructions on Measurement« [1525], were nothing other than instructions on how to produce paintings, sculptures and architecture. In modern art, in fluxus, happening and performance, the object of the painting or sculpture has been replaced by instructions. These instructions for the user of an object or for the observer of a picture have ultimately led to the explicit integration of the recipient into the work of art. The observer has become a user and therefore has a major share in the design of the artwork. It is with this function - and not only with the advent of the technical interface - that the history of interactive art begins. For that reason essential but hitherto forgotten works of op art, kinetics, arte programmata, etc. are incorporated in the discussion for the first time and put on display to illustrate the origins of interactive art. This long-prepared aesthetic turn towards a culture of reception has been greatly reinforced in music and the fine arts and, above all, in architecture, by the use of computers, because the design of calculable pictures and calculable music depends on decision-making processes involving the observer / performer or the computer. Architectural design has also moved on from manual activity and surrendered key decision-making processes in spatial design to the algorithmic processes supplied by the industrial software of 3D programmes. The very early stages of computer graphics and animation, which were the starting point for these 3D programmes, are also on display for the first time. Software art, representing the triumph of algorithmic art and the up-to-date practice of media art, has a presentation area of its own; the same applies to algorithmic net art and the latest explorations into algorithmic literature and acousmatic music. The exhibition draws on

Thomson & Craighead

Dreaming of a White

Zone de Confluences/Villette Numerique

Database Imaginary

Agile Process: A New Economy for Digital Arts in Scotland

DMZ

Games

Free Fall

BitParts

@rt.net.uk/now. New Net Art Works from Britain

Short Films About Flying

Mobile Phonics

dot-store

Game_On

Model Behaviour

RE:MOTE

OX1

Artcade

Game Show

Slipstream

Art & Money Online

A specially commissioned gallery installation for, ‘Art & money Online’ held at Tate, Britain in March 2001 and curated by Julian Stallabrass. In ‘CNN Interactive just got more interactive’ artists Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead allow visitors to add a variety of soundtracks to the monolithic CNN Interactive website in an attempt to further mediate a moment of infotainment -to bring a cinematic conceit to this ever changing global news feed. Using the fluidity of the internet to augment what is already such a dizzying hub of information transfer, the artists have decided to pipe this twenty four hour internet service into the gallery via a touchscreen console and Data projection. As such, the economy of the news is blurred ever more towards venerability and entertainment -forcing us to question ways in which we all distinguish between Fact and Fiction.

010101: Art in Technological Times

Artists' Entertainment Network

Pretty Vacant

Pandaemonium '98

Omnizone

What Difference Does It Make?

Trigger Happy

The Linguistic Turn

The Eyes of March

Ground Control

Made in Cyberspace

Obituary

Obituary was the first large scale, solo work presented in LOndon by artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead. Having investigated the intersections of popular belief, new technologies and surveillance in numerous video, multi-media, audio and internet works, the gallery space at 30 Underwood Street offered a unique opportunity to bring these concerns together in one environment.

Ripe

A group exhibition at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool

Burning the Interface

An exhibition of interactive artworks published as a CDROM called The Toybox, published by Moviola (now FACT), Liverpool and first exhibited at Tate Liverpool in 1995

Television Fan at On Mouse Up

http://www.thomson-craighead.net/docs/fan.html

Thalamus: Video Positive 1995

An interactive artwork called Thalamus, that was part of a CD ROM publication called The Toybox, published by Moviola (now FACT) and exhibited at Tate Liverpool