National Media Museum blog
From Bradford, UNESCO City of Film, we write about film, photography, television, animation, gaming and the web.
Meet the Life Online [open source] artists: Thomson and Craighead
The last two weeks have been a busy and exciting time for the team working on the Life Online temporary exhibition [open source] Is the internet you know under threat? Three of the four artworks which make up the exhibition have now been installed in the fantastic new space on the Museum’s 7th floor, and the final design is close to completion.
[open source] is made up of a series of newly-commissioned artworks that relate to the themes of online open source culture and net neutrality. We have approached some of the best UK-based artists to work with us to produce new pieces for the Life Online gallery, and held an open commission call to seek out the best concepts for an artwork relating to the exhibition’s open source theme.
We are pleased to announce that the artists featured in the [open source] exhibition are Thomson and Craighead, Ross Phillips and Erin Newell and Phil Bird (shortlisted artists in the open commission), alongside Networked, a collective of artists formed as part of the Life Online youth engagement project. Over the next three weeks we will introduce the artists and the concepts behind their artworks on this blog.
Thomson and Craighead
We are extremely proud to be working with globally-renowned visual artists Thomson and Craighead who will focus on the threat to net neutrality with their piece Live Portrait of Tim Berners-Lee (an early warning system).
The work is a pixelated portrait of Sir Tim Berners-Lee who invented the web as an open and shared platform. The portrait will be made out of live webcams updating in real-time on a regular basis. Berners-Lee’s live image will be literally made out of other peoples’ openly available data online from around the world from as far afield as Burkina Faso, Morocco, Mongolia and the Western Sahara. It will remain intact for as long as the internet continues to be free of commercial and political influence, and is open and accessible to all.
Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead are fascinated by how globalisation and networked global communications have been re-shaping the way we all perceive and understand the world around us. They live and work in London and Kingussie in the highlands of Scotland making artworks and installations for galleries, museums and site-specific locations that include the worldwide web.
Recent exhibitions include; Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn; Berkeley Art Museum, California; the Highland Institute for Contemporary Art, Scotland; Artists Space, New York; Tang Contemporary, Beijing; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland.
[open source] Is the internet you know under threat? will open on 30th March 2012.
Written by Sarah Crowther, Life Online Content Curator.
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