In conversation with... Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead

Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead are artists that work with video, sound, and digital networked space. Their most recent work, "The distance travelled through our solar system this year and all the barrels of oil remaining" is a finalist in Current, a competition which will result in an acquisition and permanent exhibition of one digital artwork into the Harris Gallery, Preston.

We caught up with Jon and Alison to talk about their work, how digital media can change our perception of the world, and how we make sense of the information around us.

Tell us about the story of the work that is in Current.

JT: When we actually proposed the work for Current, we were interested in making something new. A lot of the work that we make as artists, looks at live information - or the potential that live information has, as an artistic material. There's a lot of stuff that we have made over the past 10-15 years, that looks at how live information might be incorporated into an artwork and somehow be an entrenched part of it.

For Current, what we were looking at were real-time statistics as the potential for something which could form part of the display of the work. It's a relatively new phenomenon. In a way, it seems like an obvious thing that we should be able to see this information as it happens and changes, but the Internet now allows for people to apply algorithms which are in touch with the statistics that they require, to make projections.

We are tapping into real-time statistics and using that as the basis to make an artwork that has some sort of poetic expression.

AC: What we're really interested in, with this particular piece, is to get information which has a very monumental implication. We're using two statistics: one is the distance traveled by the Earth around the solar system this year. The other is the amount of oil barrels remaining in the world.

We're trying to strip back the presentation, so that the statistics are very nominal and minimal, but alludes to something very grand. What we're interested in what this has on viewers. When you see this as just numbers, what it represents is some sort of dramatic effect on us.

Our work uses very emotional statistics: just seeing how many oil barrels there are left, and watching the countdown, is an incredibly emotional experience. It's just a number, but it's so much more than a number. Dealing with it so dryly, and the other number, which is about rotating around the sun and how far we have travelled as a planet.

It's nice to be able to take this global view, and imagine that you are outside the Earth. These kind of statistics allow you to have a very different view of the world.

We're very interested in being here now. Taking real-time statistics is a poignant way of doing that, because it's a way of understanding yourself - not just by your age and where you are - but through statistics, which are important to humans. It's really about us exploring how we can understand now, and nowness. We really love large numbers and statistics [!] We think that they are incredibly beautiful, poetic, and sad as well.

How do technology and networks change the way in which we perceive the world around us?

JT: We don't try and make work that is proselytising technology. It's critical, but not critical in the sense that we are saying something bad. We work on the basis that we accept that the Internet, and global communications, have changed the way in which we all behave, and that's an inevitability rather than a choice. We're interested in exploring that condition.

An example might be a work which we made 2 years ago, called Horizon, where we took webcam images from around the world, from every time zone, and created a pictoral image where you were able to see a snapshot of the whole planet, just by standing in front of this projection. But, at the same time, you were outside time. Through a simple engagement with different timezones, and cameras that let you see something from every time zone in the world, [you could] somehow see time through very pedestrian, technological means.

Quite a lot of what interests us, is that you can almost see anywhere at any time through looking at things online. At the same time, if you think of things like Google Earth, you can actually engage very closely, and with hugely detailed information. So, you can look at people writing blogs in Zimbabwe, taking photographs in the Serengeti, people communicating out of Iran... or anywhere. You get this very intimate relationship with the information, but at the same time, it actually feels a bit treacherous. If you're using something like Google Earth, you have this sense that you can touch everything, and you have a God-like feeling as you move around the world, but in a way you're seeing even less than getting the bus to the supermarket. Technology offers these strange dichotomies, where we see more, but we also see less.

AC: I don't know if we are becoming part of the network, or if we already were the network. Jon and I see networks in quite a wide sense - so network can be telephony, or a network of people that meet up in Starbucks. We're very interested in how we can intervene into networks, and how we can make artworks that can incorporate networks. As humans, we evolve and want to connect with other people. and that's how networks are created.

How is our perception of geography changing? Does the ability to view anything at any angle, desensitise us?

JT: The way in which Google Earth operates gives us the sense of being somewhere and getting a view of things that feels less mediated than through the major news media, but at the same time, you are distant. I think that it does give you a global relationship.

Everyone now has Google Earth in their head - think of the Apollo photograph of Earth as the blue marble. That was the first time that we had ever seen the planet. It had a real effect in culture at the time, as everyone suddenly started talking about the "Global village", for example.

Google Earth is another moment like that; we have an almost infinite sense of things which are translocal. It might be just a small community that communicates, but it could be distributed over the whole planet. Different communities start to emerge, and our relationship with them becomes translocalised. At the same time, the risk is that people could feel close to something like Egypt, and because they feel close, they almost feel gratified in a way that perhaps makes people less likely to act.

Works such as Flat Earth take content from other sources and stitches it together. Because it's now very easy to simply reproduce and redisplay content elsewhere, what does that say about the value of content overall?

JT: A lot of what we do as artists is that we describe ourselves as participant observers. That's borrowing from anthropology as a term, so in a way we're trying to do stuff which reveals certain mechanisms in certain things. In one way, it's an attempt to raise awareness.

The exploitation of other people's content that we might seem to be perpetrating, is symbolic - compared with content in something like Facebook. The idea of the prosumer is based on the creation of content being farmed out from a company, that then profits from advertising revenue. It is quite a weird sort of situation.

One of the things that we try to do with works like Flat Earth, is to look at Creative Commons as a structure in which you can use other people's content through the Attribution licence. As long as you say that you got it from somewhere, you are free and at liberty to use it. With Flat Earth, almost everything within it is licensed from Creative Commons, and we're actually interested in that as an alternative economy, if you like, of being able to share information and intellectual property. But, it's a complicated question, there's a lot of legislation in development, through which the kinds of people that make mashups and use other people's content have to start using a micropayment licensing system.

Companies are developing ways in which they will licence in a way where, say, if you use a pop song, you might only have to pay a small amount of money to licence its use. Then, I suppose, then as a producer, as someone that is mixing and mashing up bits, you are at liberty to profit from it as well. I'm not really sure how these new models are going to emerge really. Will they mix up with Creative Commons? Will they end up as being for the benefit of a company? Will the prosumer, that puts lots of effort into reworking and reconfiguring information, get a good deal? It's a wide open field.

We're really interested in Creative Commons as a model. Copyleft is something that has a lot of potential for people to share and swap information, and to rework things in ways that don't have to get bogged down in traditional copyright models. It works both ways, because copyright was developed as a way to try to protect the intellectual property of creativity. It's a tricky balance that has to be struck, as things change.

Flat Earth, 2008

AC: With the advent of the Internet and the small proportion of the world that has access to it, then I think that technology does change how we perceive ourselves, from the idea that we no longer passively accept information. The prosumer can start to authenticate data, rather than through one authority. We didn't have that ability to authenticate before. With an encyclopaedia, you wouldn't have argued with it - how can I verify that myself? So, that's how I think we're changing.

Both The Time Machine and Flipped Clock play with our perceptions of trust and expectation. Have we become too trustworthy of digital media?

AC: I don't think that it's trust as much as authority. It's being in a position now where we can authenticate information - making ourselves aware that the BBC, New York Times, and Guardian - for example - "standardise" information. A blogger in Egypt for example, helps people to feel awakened, and to be able to check the information themselves and to think about it. I think that it's about understanding the languages of authority that information is delivered in.

It's complex; if you're going to the Flickr page of someone in Egypt, there are different ways of authenticating that information than if you went to the BBC and looked at images coming out of Egypt. It's the ability to switch, that is interesting.

JT: It does cut both ways. The flipped clock is an almost absurdly simple gesture. The idea of it is to create even just a brief moment where you wake up from yourself, and see "clock time". It's something that we learn to read as young children, and maybe that's what we're trying to do with a lot of our work: these little moments where you see things again, almost as if it's the first time that you see something which has an innate authority. You believe it, even though it might not be true.

There's a flipside to that. When you think of things like Wikipedia, what you do as a user is look at something and think that it's probably true, but you have to check the facts. You have to make sure that it is true... if you are serious about research and information. That's something that we should always do. When we go to libraries, or look at encyclopedias, they present themselves as authorities of information - but they're not. They have mistakes in as well, whereas Wikipedia has this sense of obligation that you have to check your facts, built into the very fabric of how it works.

In that respect, digital technology works more towards the individual, where the individual has to take responsibility with the information they get.

What emotions are you looking to provoke in your work? Disruption? Immersion?

AC: Our approach has always been about tying knots. It's not about re-appropriating media; it's more about catching datastreams and then allowing the view to see them for a moment in a new configuration. It's not about appropriation of objects, it's more about taking two or three datafeeds, and tying them into a knot, so that they exist for a few minutes together and disappear. Looking at streams of information rather than defined objects, is more our approach, and we're trying to allow people to see the world in a different way. By overlaying different datafeeds together, to allow them to understand the world slightly differently.

In terms of the representation of data, how has the relationship between medium and message changed since McLuhan?

AC: What we are dealing with now is more about filtering and overload. We have so much information and we can't consume that much. The whole argument is from a different time now.

It was a really important article, written at a really important moment. The speed at which things have developed means that we are now onto a whole new set. I wish that we had someone that could visualise the big issues as clearly now. We are dealing with enormous amounts of information, and I think that the big issue now is that the Internet has been built on a set of principles which are now being commercialised.

What are your thoughts on Current?

JT: I think that it's a timely and important project. One of the things about artists using what are called new technologies, even though they have obviously been around for a while now, is that the works are seen as ephemeral. They are works which are not paint on canvas and are not marble; they are much more like performance art - something which has a lifespan. So, for Current to begin to explore the ways in which artists work in this way can be preserved, or can be assimilated into a collection, is a really important question. Otherwise, it is not. The ways of this activity will cease to have any trace.

Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead are London-based artists that have been working with video, audio and network technology since 1993. Jon Thomson is also a lecturer at the Slade, while Alison Craighead also lectures in Fine Art at Goldsmiths. Their website features a full compendium of their works from the past two decades.