For the whole of the rest of August, the single screen versions of all three parts of our
Flat Earth Trilogy will be showing at Taigh Chearsabhagh Art Centre in Lochmaddy on North Uist in the Outer Hebrides. More information here:
taigh-chearsabhagh.org/taighc_events/flat-earth-trilogy-thomson-craighead/
It's the first time we have displayed these works in this way and if you're lucky enough to be out on the Western Isles this month then do pop in and take a look. The entire cycle of works last around 30minutes.
Flat Earth Trilogy is a series of documentary artworks each made entirely from information found on the worldwide web. The trilogy covers a six-year period beginning with
Flat Earth (2007),
A short film about War (2009/2010) and ending with
Belief (2012). In each case, the viewer is taken around the world encountering fragments taken from real peoples' blogs, which are knitted together to form something resembling a story.
In
Flat Earth, we see the visual language established where Google Earth is used as a way of joining each of these narrative moments together.
A short film about War focuses more specifically on the collective gaze of photo-sharing communities like flickr as a way of apprehending the locations being spoken about, while
Belief looks to the video sharing community youtube and the phenomenon of video blogging and to a lesser extent ‘trolling’, where individuals attempt to sow discord online as an end in itself.
In all of these works, we are interested in exploring how our own spheres of influence have been extended and transformed by the internet, allowing us to experience and broadcast information around the globe in ways unheard of even fifteen years ago.
Flat Earth was made with Channel 4 and Animate Projects for television broadcast, but
A short film about War and
Belief have been developed as gallery installations as well as the single screen videos seen here.
In the gallery version of
A short film about War, a second screen logs the provenance of images, blog fragments and GPS locations of each element comprising the work, so that the same information is simultaneously communicated to the viewer in two parallel formats -on one hand as a dramatised reportage and on the other hand as a text log.
The gallery version of
Belief adds a synchronised floor projection of a compass, which interacts with the montage showing us where each clip originates in relation to the geographical location of the artwork thus placing the viewer at the centre point of a cinematic data-visualisation.
In both cases, the artists’ want us to consider our own relationship with this material -the way in which information changes as it is gathered, edited and then mediated through networked communications technologies or broadcast media, and how that changes and distorts what things mean; especially for (the generally wealthy minority of) the world's users of high speed broadband networks, who have become used to the treacherously persuasive panoptic view that Google Earth (and the worldwide web) appears to give us.
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