Output details

Thomson & Craighead (Exhibition: "Not Even the Sky", MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen, Germany, 26/10/2013-6/1/2014; Publication "Thomson & Craighead Flat Earth" 2013)

Curated exhibition of the work of British artists Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead, who have worked with new media technology for over 20 years. The exhibition features eleven artworks from over a decade of practice made using live data streams, webcams, and found footage. It includes the premiere of the generative video installation work, ‘The First Person’, the first part of an ongoing series of sculptures – light boxes created with images from broken networked cameras available online, and a new German edition of their work ‘Here’, a publicly sited sculpture in the form of a traffic road sign installed in the town of Memmingen. The exhibition is documented in a new fully illustrated colour, bilingual (English and German) publication edited by Cook. The book includes essays by Sarah Cook, Clive Gillman and a conversation between the artists and Steve Rushton, alongside a comprehensive exhibition history and bibliography. The book highlights the works included in the exhibition alongside other artworks which feature in a subsequent exhibition ‘Maps, DNA and Spam’, opening January 2014 at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Cook has researched Thomson & Craighead’s work from 2000 and included their work in previous curated exhibitions (‘Database Imaginary’ The Banff Centre, 2004; ‘My Own Private Reality’ Edith Russ Site for Media Art, 2005; ‘Mirror Neurons’, AV Festival, 2010). Cook’s chapter ‘Far Out! Distance and Location in the work of Thomson & Craighead’ connects their networked art practice to a history of sited and location-based art work from the 1960s and contemporary use of webcams in art. The exhibition and publication was co-funded by Creative Scotland and the British Council (Creative Futures in Germany).