Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead work across video, sound, sculpture, installation and online space, using technology as a means to reformulate fundamental human questions for contemporary times. Over the last twenty years, they have produced a generous body of lyrical artworks that examine the changing socio-political structures of the Information Age. A particular focus is the ever closer connection of the digital and physical worlds, creating an additional geographical layer in our collective sensorium.
A video-drawing made from two live cameras located on opposite sides of the world and eleven time zones apart from each other. As the earth rotates, night becomes day and day becomes night, inverting the image invert every twelve hours.
A perfume developed in collaboration with a with a professional perfumer, based on the olfactory (smell-related) materials described in The Book Of Revelation as it appears in the King James Bible. A chemical depiction of the biblical End of Times.
An edition of twelve photographic light boxes each displaying twelve frames taken from a corrupt video file found online; a file intended to put a virus onto the downloader's computer.
Common Era is a series of sixteen posters, each describing a different prediction of the end of the world described by prophets, scientists, and gurus, from Nostradamus to Schroeder and Smith.
A poetry machine that uses the human genome as a music score, playing back a self-assembling video montage spanning the thirteen years it took the Human Genome Project to complete the first documented human DNA sequence.
A re-edit of the classic 1960 film with every word put into alphabetical order. The arbitrary use of a system of classification enables a kind of time travel is attempted through the reclamation and distortion of the movie's original timeline.
2018 The Academy of Saturn, Cooley Gallery, Portland, USA
2018 I Was Raised in the Internet, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA
2017 The New Observatory, FACT, Liverpool, UK
2017 I Want! I Want! I Want!, Birmingham City Gallery, Birmingham, UK
2017 Perpetual Uncertainty, Z33, Hasselt, Belgium
2017 Slow Violence, UH Galleries, Hatfield, UK
2017 Wake me up when it's over, Young Projects Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
2016 Party Booby Trap, Carroll/Fletcher, London, UK
2014 Maps DNA and Spam, Dundee Contemporary Arts
2013 Not even the Sky, MEWO Kunsthalle, Memminge, Germany
2013 Never odd or even, Carroll/Fletcher, London, UK
2017 Glut: Information, images and Excess, Holden Gallery, Manchester, UK
2017 Monsters of the Machine, Laboral, Gijon, Spain
2016 Electronic Superhighway, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK
2016 Perpetual Uncertainty, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden
2015 Art in the age of asymmetrical warfare, Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands
2014 Thingworld, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China
