Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Goldsmiths' College
A Short Film About War
'A Short Film About War' was commissioned by Alt-w/New Media Scotland in 2009. It is a two-channel documentary artwork made from information found online, and forms part of a wider project called 'Flat Earth Trilogy'. It considers new models of documentary making, asking what potential our new globally accessible databases and social media repositories have as documentary archives, while focusing on how information is distorted as it is mediated through globally networked digital communications systems.
The work is a narrative documentary made entirely from information found on the worldwide web. Viewers are taken around the world to a variety of war zones as seen through the collective eyes of the online photo sharing community Flickr, and as witnessed by a variety of existing military and civilian bloggers. As the ostensibly documentary 'film' plays itself out, a second screen logs the provenance of images, blog fragments and gps locations of each element comprising the work, so that the same information is simultaneously communicated to the viewer in two parallel formats, on one hand as a dramatised reportage and on the other hand as a text log.
The other two works in the trilogy are 'Flat Earth' (2007) commissioned by Channel 4 & AnimateTV and ‘Belief’ (2012) commissioned through a Vital Spark nomination with Creative Scotland. Catalogues include ‘My War’ (FACT, 110 pages ISBN 978-3-86828-134-7) ‘Image Counter Image’ (Haus der Kunst 200 pages ISBN 978-3-86335-208-0). The work has been nominated for a Tiger Award and the Samsung Art Prize. It is also the subject of an online exhibition at the International New Media Gallery (inmg.org.uk, online catalogue 32 pages at http://www.inmg.org.uk/thomson-craighead/catalogue).
