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ISSN 1755-0866 | Online

Issue 4 | Dec 07

Thomson & Craighead Weather Gauge

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Text and images © 2007 artists, writers and Horsecross Arts Ltd

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Threshold artspace launched in September 2005 in Perth, UK. It is home to Scotland’s only permanent collection of contemporary media art with 60 works acquired over 2 years. The artspace covers a number of project spaces available for artists’ interventions including an entrance box for interactive soundscapes; a ‘canvas’ of 22 flat screens dominating the artspace for multi-channel video art installations; an interactive playground for art games and live internet art; a trail of sound boxes and sensors embedded in the floor and ceiling;an audio visual treat in the public toilets; copper-clad roof for light artists. All Threshold artspace locations are linked together by ‘intelligent’ software which allows artworks to be displayed through curated exhibitions and experienced 24 hours a day throughout the year.

Horsecross is an independent arts agency delivering cultural, conference and community activity in Perth Concert Hall and Perth Theatre. Located within the foyer of Perth Concert Hall Threshold artspace sits on the site of the original Horsecross, Perth’s 17th century horse market. The name is synonymous with bustling activity in the heart of the city. The development of the £19.5m Perth Concert Hall and Threshold artspace was a Millennium project and is part of the area’s economic development strategy to position Perth as one of Europe’s most vibrant small cities by 2010.

Horsecross aims to put this part of central Scotland firmly on the cultural map both nationally and internationally.

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Since they began working together in the early 1990s, collaborative duo Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead have exhibited their work extensively throughout the UK and abroad and have become two of Britain’s most prominent artists working with new media art. The pair started out creating gallery-based video works, but found themselves utilizing the Internet for editing when video post-production shifted from analogue systems. Even in 1995, when the Internet was in its infancy and barely supported images, Thomson & Craighead were interested in the architecture of the web and how the hyperlinked network could be navigated. They began to see this resource like a giant database, and utilized it in their work.¹

Weather Gauge developed out of these artistic escapades. The work exists online² and as a permanent gallery installation at the Threshold artspace. It displays the current temperature and local time of 105 different cities, including Perth. The work³ opens to a black screen with the names of the different cities displayed in white and arranged in a grid. A few seconds after the webpage is downloaded, one by one the city names are replaced with the current temperature and local time, animated in neon green. A minute or so after this data from all of the cities has been received and displayed, the webpage refreshes and loads again. The piece collects live weather data from Internet sources worldwide and provides a “snapshot of our world in real time”⁴. The number of cities represented reinforces the vastness of the Internet, and the amount of live information available. Occasionally, one or several of the cities will flash a green “ERROR” message, meaning the weather station from that city is not currently transmitting. Thomson & Craighead point out that “you will often find the cities reporting ‘ERROR’ will be suffering some national disaster, a war perhaps”⁵. This is an interesting subtext to the work, and a powerful reminder of the relationship between the content featured in Weather Gauge and the geographical locations it represents.

Decorative Newsfeeds (2005) takes a similar approach by re-appropriating live headline news and turning it into a decorative automatic drawing. The artists are sensitive to the ephemeral nature of new media, and have documented works like Weather Gauge and Decorative Newsfeeds to ensure that others could potentially recreate them in the future with contemporary technologies.⁶ Following in the footsteps of contemporary artists of the 1960s such as Lawrence Weiner⁷, this ensures that their work will not necessarily disappear when current technologies go out of date.

As many works by Thomson & Craighead utilize re-appropriated Internet data, there is very little control over how long the original links will remain active. They state, “in general, that’s fine with us… we have some older works that we continue to maintain and update (e.g. CNN Interactive), and others we are simply leaving to decay over time (e.g. Pet Pages).”⁸ Pet Pages (1997), an Internet-based piece that linked to information people posted online about their pets, is no longer functioning. As links became broken, Thomson & Craighead decided not to keep remaking the piece; they decided to let the work die, in fitting with the subject matter.⁹

This re-appropriation of data forces its re-examination, and often yields a deeper understanding of it. Weather Gauge, while at first glance a simple collection of local times and temperatures, represents the entire world at a single moment in time, and reinforces awareness of the connection between online information and its geographical source.

With the advent of the Internet, information from all over the world is available faster and in greater quantity than ever before. Internet users have access to breaking news, live feeds, and can find updated details just about everything and everywhere. London-based Thomson & Craighead utilize this wealth of information like a painter does his watercolours, and re-appropriate it in much of their art. Weather Gauge (2005), juxtaposes up-to-the minute weather data from all over the globe, and explores the relationship between time and place, information and technology. With its subtle grid structure this work creates a sense of global landscape in the making while raising questions about our perception of reality beyond our physical locatedness.

Weather Gauge Lindsey Morse

The essay Weather Gauge by Lindsey Morse was commissioned on the occasion of the acquisition of Thomson & Craighead’s work for Horsecross permanent collection of contemporary art and its public premiere at Threshold art-space as part of Time group exhibition in September 2007 showing at Threshold Stage Screen – a dedicated project space for showcasing artists’ works which use the Internet environment and its functionality as their media of choice.

Lindsey Morse, contributing author in Read More series, received a BA in art history from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia in 2004 and an M.Litt in Museum and Gallery Studies from the University of St Andrews in 2006, where she was awarded a distinction for her dissertation on the subject of sound art in Scotland. She has worked in museum education and collections management at the Atlanta History Center, Louisiana Children’s Museum and South Geor-gia Museum and ultimately wishes to pursue a PhD in new media art.

Weather Gauge by Thomson & Craighead by has been acquired by Horsecross with the support of Scottish National Party.

Weather Gauge

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Notes(1) From an email interview with the artists from 01 December 2007.

(2) http://www.weathergauge.net/

(3) Ibid.

(4) From an email interview with the artists from 01 December 2007.

(5) Ibid

(6) Please see Martin John Callanan’s interview with Thomson & Craighead published in Vague Terrain 08: Process Journal, November 2007. Available online at: http://www.vagueterrain.net/

(7) A leading figure in the conceptual art movement, in his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, penned his Declaration of Intent (1968) that stated “1. The artist may construct the piece. 2. The piece may be fabricated. 3. The piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receiver ship”. The idea of the work is the artwork, but so is every fabrication, regardless of whether it is made by the artist or someone else.

(8) Please see Martin John Callanan’s interview with Thomson & Craighead published in Vague Terrain 08: Process Journal, November 2007. Available online at: http://www.vagueterrain.net/

(9) Please see Charlotte Frost’s interview with Thomson & Craighead published at Rhizome on June 10, 2003. Available online at: http://rhizome.org/ discuss/view/9129

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ISSN 1755-0866 | OnlineISSN 1755-0866 | Online