Short Film about War

A Short film about War is a narrative documentary artwork made entirely from information found on the worldwide web. In ten minutes this two screen gallery installation takes viewers around the world to a variety of war zones as seen through the collective eyes of the online photo sharing community Flickr, and as witnessed by a variety of existing military and civilian bloggers. As the ostensibly documentary 'film' plays itself out, 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. In offerring this tautology, we are attempting to explore and reveal 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 meaning -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.

Short films about flying

Online artwork which streams web-cam images live from the Internet and re-mixes them into disjointed narrative sequences, thereby producing cinema as a 'found object' made entirely of live material streamed from the internet. ‘Short Films about Flying’ is an online film which explores how a cinematic work can be generated using live material from the internet. The work is driven by software that takes surveillance video from a live camera feed at Logan Airport, Boston, and combines this with randomly grabbed audio from the web and texts taken from websites, chat rooms, message boards etc. This results in an endless open edition of unique cinematic works in real-time. By combining the language of cinema with global real-time data technologies, this work is one of the first new media artworks to re-imagine the internet in a different sensory form as a cinematic space. ‘Short Films about Flying’ was developed over the course of a year in collaboration with Jon Thomson (Slade) to explore how the concept of the found object can be re-conceptualised as the found data stream. It has informed other research by Craighead and Thomson, such as the web project http://www.templatecinema.com, and began an examination into relationships between montage and live virtual data –an early example of which would be ‘Flat Earth’, an animated work developed for Channel 4 in 2007, with the production company Animate. This piece has been cited in discussions on new media art, as a significant example of artworks using a database as their determining structure. It was acquired for the Arts Council Collection and has continuously toured significant international venues over the last 4 years. Citations include:’ Time and Technology’ by Charlie Gere (2006); 'The Wrong Categories' by Kris Cohen (2006); 'Networked Art - Practices and Positions' edited by Tom Corby (Routledge 2005) and Grayson Perry in The Times (9.8.06).