Year: 2014
Medium: Photographic light boxes
Dimensions: h42.5 x w56.5 x d11.5
Brief biography: Jon Thomson (b. 1969, London, England) and Alison Craighead (b. 1971, Aberdeen, Scotland) are artists living and working in London.
Corruption I and Corruption II are from 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 but which appears pixilated, painterly and abstract when opened in a video player. In searching out these glitches, malfunctions and distortions, the artists represent them as aesthetic propositions, reminding us that the act of looking itself distorts our perception of reality. Lenticular printing enables the artists to show multiple images that animate as the viewer moves in space. They do not ‘playback’ or move automatically.
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. Much of their recent work looks at live networks like the webs and how they are changing the way we all understand the world around us. Having both studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Thomson is Reader in Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, while Craighead is a reader in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at University of Westminster and lectures in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University.