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When setting out to think
about, or to discuss, images and artwork it is almost impossible
not to consider the subject within wider contexts. It makes
sense to reference how the work under analysis sits within
the history of image making, of art, of theory and within
social relations. This is of course the case even when looking
at an artwork inside the gallery –so not mediated through
an article such as this- one will automatically make connections,
in order to make sense of what is being presented.
This is particularly the case when thinking about art that
comes under the headings of ‘photography’ and
‘video’, where the connections will not only be
to the discipline of art, but also to the everyday experiences
of life – books, magazines, television, advertising,
newspapers and the internet. These channels of communication
utilise both images and text, and photography and video sit
within a complex network of relationships. As the French sociologist
Pierre Bordieu wrote, one can learn more about the world around
us by looking at networks and connections, rather than by
simply looking at images.
In many ways this notion is at the heart of the practice of
conceptual artists of the 1970s who looked to ‘dematerialise
the art object’ and to think about how the viewer could
be involved as an active element of the artwork. This period
of artistic practice bought photography and video into the
gallery and museum, and developed debates around ideas of
authenticity and the art object, which had been central to
modernist practice. For example, think of Robert Smithson’s
Spiral Jetty. Is ‘the work’ the spiral form in
a salt lake in Utah, or is it the photographic documentation
of it? I think the answer is something between the two –
it is in the relationships between the object, the event and
process of making it, its dissemination through documentation,
and its reception.
These concerns can be seen in the work of London based artists
Thomson and Craighead, who have been working collaboratively
since the early 1990s. Working individually in video and audio,
they came together to work on a number of video based installations.
These placed the viewer as an active collaborator in the work:
they describe their practice working with “navigable
bodies of data”, investigating how networks of information
and belief are constructed, inviting the viewer to enter and
engage with them.
Transposing these concerns of communication and associated
systems of belief into the gallery context creates a tension
of relationships that question power structures and desires
for authenticity endemic to the institutions of art. In an
early work Television Fan (1996) Thomson and Craighead examined
relationships between consumption of television and the medium
itself. In a low lit gallery space a television and a domestic
fan are set opposite each other, with the fan creating the
impression that it is effecting the images appearing on the
screen. This illusion reflects the myth of choice associated
with the power one has when holding the remote control –
we can change the channel, volume and brightness but the relationship
remains one of a passive consumer and an active flow of information.
This relationship between the message of the media and its
consumption is explored again by Thomson and Craighead, in
a work commissioned by Tate Britain, entitled CNN Interactive
Just Got More Interactive (2001). Here a live feed from the
international news website CNN is projected large scale in
a gallery, while visitors are given the opportunity to add
their own soundtrack to the news. One could select ‘jubilant’
or ‘contemplative’ or disaster’ or even
‘festive‘ music to accompany the breaking story
on the CNN site. This constantly updating channel of information
becomes, with the added soundtrack, something entertaining,
or like a Hollywood movie. Rather than being displayed as
‘truth’ the reporting of news becomes a system
of spectacle and entertainment – or as Pierre Bordieu
would have it, in his lecture On Television at the College
de France in 1996, news reporting becomes “at once dehistoricised
and dehistoricising, fragmented and fragmenting [. . .] a
series of apparently absurd stories that all end up looking
the same, endless parades of poverty stricken countries, sequences
of events that, having appeared with no explanation, will
disappear with no solution”.
Thomson and Craighead’s interest in the Internet developed
out of the process of making video work. “More and more
we were editing on computers, and it became a way of working”.
At this time, around 1994, the Internet was not the medium
we know it to be today, it was solely text based. As the use
of the Internet increased visual content developed, and at
this point Thomson and Craighead began to see the possibilities
of interrogating the medium. Two projects currently under
development are Template Cinema (2002) and dot-store.com (2002),
which combine notions of the ready-made and appropriation
with mainstream networks of communication.
As with CNN Interactive Just Got More Interactive, Template
Cinema appropriates live feeds from the Internet. As more
individuals utilise a broadband connection, i.e. allowing
a greater capacity for information to reach one’s computer,
imaging on the World Wide Web incorporates more moving images.
One example of this is the site livewave.com, where it is
possible to operate a remotely controlled camera to track
aeroplanes landing at Logan Airport in Boston. The camera
is connected to a computer bringing high-resolution images
from the international airport in America to one’s computer,
which could be located anywhere. By tracking the aeroplane,
effectively, one can visually land it, creating a short film
that is uploaded to the website. Thomson and Craighead appropriate
this data to create their own film - Short Film About Flying.
“The technology is about having control of the camera
yourself. We take the stream and then put it onto our website.
And then this is accompanied by music that we pull in from
another web site. The robot camera creates the images, and
we can soundtrack it with music, say, from the Philippines.
New technology comes at us so fast at the moment that it seems
that there is so much space around, and we are trying to learn
about things by pulling them apart. Electronic networked space
represents something that is utterly mutable. It extends ideas.
Like the classic conceptual strategy of just describing something,
what we are doing here is bringing analogues of something
that is just describing something as different.” An
artwork is created that cannot be controlled, existing in
an unlimited edition. The work is entirely contingent on external
factors: the live data streaming through the Internet connection.
This relationship between art and the market is taken one
step further in dot-store.com, which will be online later
this year. As the World Wide Web developed into a publicly
accessible network, many individuals used it to create intensely
personal pages. Often these would consist of a picture of
the author, alongside information on that person’s family,
pets and hobbies. This domestic use of global communication
unconsciously rails against the commodification of communication.
However, as the popularity of the Home Page became a recognisable
trend, a precedent developed where links could be made from
these pages to commercial sites, and it would be possible
to purchase a listed item, such as a favourite book. “You
could make links to amazon, they gave you a kit where you
could make your own bookstore and you become an amazon associate.
It is a pyramid type selling structure where you get a percentage
of something and you spread the word. There are specialist
sites all over the web, while it is becoming more and more
advertisement orientated and commercial.”
Dot-store.com will exist, as what seems to all intents and
purposes, a commercial marketplace selling items including
badges, tea towels, CDs and temporary tattoos commissioned
by Thomson and Craighead. It will mimic the errors of on-line
selling, making all the usual mistakes and miscommunications,
ultimately resulting in a commercial failure. Secure credit
card payments will be taken, with each customer given a numerological
reading of their card number. “In the shop we also use
other people’s products as well, we are interested in
spreading beyond the store itself. We will be proud members
of a number of web rings – these are where you create
specific networks of people. We want to get a lot of connectivity
going on. We want to see that we are more successful than
sites that sell art.” The tea towels for example, are
based on search engine results. One design features the Google
Search engine, asking ‘is anybody there?’ which
pulls up a list of links ranging from The American Humanist
Association to crisis message boards and advertisements. Lenticular
badges and temporary tattoos consisting of familiar icons
that appear on the Internet –such as ‘site under
construction’ or downloading icons- will create emblems
of mundane technical iconography. “We are making vintage
what is mutable and very recent, fleeting technology. These
items will look completely archaic in a few years time. We
are trying to problematise the authenticity. On-line the endless
permutations mean that you cannot locate where the authentic
is.”
After a specified time period dot-store.com will be auctioned
on Ebay to the highest bidder. Will it be bought by an art
collector, as a growing concern, or simply for the domain
name? What is the artwork here – is it the object status
consisting of a CD-ROM, registered domain name and unsold
stock? Like Spiral Jetty ‘the work’ is the network
between all of these elements, mediated by how we, as users,
interact with it.
All quotes taken from an interview between Lisa Le Feuvre
and Thomson + Craighead, July 2002 |
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