Thomson & Craighead
»Flat Earth«, 2007
Video, 7:09 Min.
Courtesy of the artists

May 7 – June 3, 2010

Invited by Sabine Himmelsbach (Director, Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Oldenburg)

»Flat Earth« (2007)

The pair of British artists, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, style their 2007 video, »Flat Earth«, as a »desktop documentary«. The work is based on intensive image and text research conducted in the World Wide Web, in which the two artists pull together material from the most diverse of internet sources. Using motifs from image data banks or spoken blog entries from all over the world, they weave fragmented reports on catastrophes, personal commentaries and global events, brought to the attention of the audience by means of a virtual tour around the world. Thomson and Craighead make use of the potential and the tools of Web 2.0 – such as a function of Google Earth, which gives you a satellite view of Earth in order to then zoom in on any destination on its surface. Places and stories change spasmodically. Viewers are plunged into the information flood that is the World Wide Web via a series of snapshots where they hear and see glimpses of personal stories, only to shift perspective a moment later. The voices of the innumerable cultural producers and agents, who make known their opinions and experiences in the internet, generate the narratives. The video reflects this digital communication in a globalised world. In »Flat Earth«, the world on our desktops has become a disc again, on which our journeys are solely virtual ones, and other places and countries seem only a few mouseclicks away.

Text: Sabine Himmelsbach

Website of the artists: http://www.thomson-craighead.net