Jon Thomson (born 1969) and Alison Craighead (born 1971) are

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

-based

visual artists The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts al ...

, who work with

video Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syste ...

sound In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the ...

and the

internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

Life and work

Jon Thomson was born in

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

and Alison Craighead in

Aberdeen Aberdeen (; sco, Aiberdeen ; gd, Obar Dheathain ; la, Aberdonia) is a city in North East Scotland, and is the third most populous city in the country. Aberdeen is one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas (as Aberdeen City), and ...

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...

. They have been working together with

and the

since 1993. Much of their work to date explores how technology changes the way we perceive the world around us. They use live data to make artworks, including "template cinema online artworks" and gallery installations, where networked movies are created in real time from online material such as remote-user security web cams, audio feeds and chat room text transcripts. Recently (as of 2008) they have made outdoor semi-permanent works, ''Decorative Newsfeeds'' and BEACON, where the emphasis is on live virtual information. In BEACON, data is projected onto gallery walls, interacting with viewers' physical space. In 2008 they made an animated documentary, ''Flat Earth'', where the voices of

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

gers found online are combined with

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...

satellite imagery Satellite images (also Earth observation imagery, spaceborne photography, or simply satellite photo) are images of Earth collected by imaging satellites operated by governments and businesses around the world. Satellite imaging companies sell ima ...

. In 2005 they won Arts Foundation award, and were fellows at the MacDowell Colony,

New Hampshire New Hampshire is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec t ...

in Autumn 2004. Here 24,859 - artwork

Created by Thomson & Craighead, ''

Here Here is an adverb that means "in, on, or at this place". It may also refer to: Software * Here Technologies, a mapping company * Here WeGo (formerly Here Maps), a mobile app and map website by Here Television * Here TV (formerly "here!"), a TV ...

'' is a 2013 artwork formed by a standard 2.64m tall UK road sign pointing north from a riverside path in east London and displaying the 24,859 mile distance around the circumference of the earth back to the sign's position. Maggie Gray in art magazine ''Apollo'' said: "Such pieces command attention and, once they have it, direct that attention outwards to their surroundings, or back on to the viewer." In 2014, it was one of nine works chosen from over 70 submissions for ''The Line'', an art project distributed along a three-mile route following some of London's waterways between Stratford and North Greenwich. The route opened in 2015. Thomson is Professor of Fine Art at the

Slade School of Fine Art The UCL Slade School of Fine Art (informally The Slade) is the art school of University College London (UCL) and is based in London, England. It has been ranked as the UK's top art and design educational institution. The school is organised as ...

in London. Craighead is currently Reader at the

University of Westminster , mottoeng = The Lord is our Strength , type = Public , established = 1838: Royal Polytechnic Institution 1891: Polytechnic-Regent Street 1970: Polytechnic of Central London 1992: University of Westminster , endowment = £5.1 million ...

, and also lectures in Fine Art at

Goldsmiths, University of London Goldsmiths, University of London, officially the Goldsmiths' College, is a constituent research university of the University of London in England. It was originally founded in 1891 as The Goldsmiths' Technical and Recreative Institute by the Wor ...

Exhibitions

Exhibitions include 'Maps DNA and Spam' at Dundee Contemporary Arts; Never Odd nor even at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery London;

Tate Britain Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in ...

; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SFMOMA; Laboral Art Centre in Gijon, Spain; Zentrum Kunst Media

ZKM The ZKM , Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (until March 2016: ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology), a cultural institution, was founded in 1989. and since 1997 is located in a listed industrial building in Karlsruhe, Germany, a former muni ...

, Karlsruhe, Germany;

The New Museum The New Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is a museum in New York City at 235 Bowery, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. History The museum originally opened in a space in the Graduate Center of the then-named New Scho ...

, New York; Mejanlabs, Stockholm; Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase, New York.

Notes and references

External links

Official website

Template Cinema online

Slade Centre for Electronic Media

Rhizome

Channel Four and Animate projects interviews Thomson & Craighead, 2007

Charlotte Frost interviews Thomson & Craighead for Rhizome, 2003
{{DEFAULTSORT:Thomson and Craighead English artists British conceptual artists Academics of University College London Alumni of the Slade School of Fine Art Art duos Living people 1969 births 1971 births