Ms Alison Craighead
I am a Reader in contemporary art and visual culture at University of Westminster and also lecture in fine art at Goldsmiths University, London.
I work as a visual artist in collaboration with Jon Thomson (The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London) making artworks and installations for galleries, online and sometimes outdoors. Much of our recent work explores how trends of globalisation and global communications networks are re-shaping the way we all perceive and understand the world around us.
This year I am actively researching artists' use of text starting with Gertrude Stein and carrying through into digital art.
My collaborative research with Jon Thomson continues to explore relationships between data visualization and cinema -a recent example being Belief made from information found entirely on the worldwide web. This two-screen installation presents a 15-minute series of fragmented broadcasts about belief, all sourced from the video sharing community YouTube. A compass floor projection interacts with the montage, showing where each clip originated in relation to the geographical location of the artwork. With a little help from Google Earth viewers are placed at the centre point of this cinematic data visualisation.
Our research also looks more generally at how real time processes and live data transmission can be used as a material or artistic medium.