e-poltergeist

E-poltergeist takes over the user’s internet browser, automatically initiating Web searches without their permission. Web-based artwork which explores issues of user control when confronted with complex technological systems, questioning the limits of digital interactive arts as consensual reciprocal systems. e-poltergeist was a major web commission that marked an early stage of research in a larger enquiry by Craighead and Thomson into the relationship between live virtual data, global communications networks and instruction-based art, exploring how such systems can be re-contextualised within gallery environments. e-poltergeist presented the 'viewer' with a singular narrative by using live internet search-engine data that aimed to create a perpetual and virtually unstoppable cycle of search engine results, banner ads and moving windows as an interruption into the normal use of an internet browser. The work also addressed the ‘de-personalisation’ of internet use by sending a series of messages from the live search engine data that seemed to address the user directly: 'Is anyone there?'; 'Can anyone hear me?', 'Please help me!'; 'Nobody cares!' e-poltergeist makes a significant contribution to the taxonomy of new media art by dealing with the way that new media art can re-address notions of existing traditions in art such as appropriation and manipulation, instruction-based art and conceptual art. e-poltergeist was commissioned ($12,000) for 010101: Art in Technological Times, a landmark international exhibition presented by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which bought together leading international practitioners working with emergent technologies, including Tatsuo Miyajima, Janet Cardiff, Brian Eno. Peer recognition of the project in the form of reviews include: Curating New Media. Gateshead: Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Cook, Sarah, Beryl Graham and Sarah Martin ISBN: 1093655064; The Wire; http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2000/12/40464 (review by Reena Jana); Leonardo (review Barbara Lee Williams and Sonya Rapoport) http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/feb2001/ex_010101_willrapop.html All the work is developed jointly and equally between Craighead and her collaborator, Jon Thomson, Slade School of Fine Art.

Beacon

Artwork using Internet search engine technology to make people’s online desires, interests and orientations visible, presenting random search term enquiries in a variety of forms including a railway information sign, an art gallery installation and an online website. activity, curiosity and desire. The project sampled and analysed how ‘search terms’ were used by the public as live data. It then re-presented them on a website, in a gallery and latterly on a bespoke mechanical railway flap-sign, thus creating a snapshot of online enquiry at any give time. Beacon’s originality lies in the manner in which it has taken abstract digital data and found different expressions for it. Thus the work extends debates in media arts that focus on purely virtual and online expressions of data, by developing online information into new non-digital material forms and contexts such as railway signs. This research has been developed over a three year period. Initially with software only and then on receipt of AHRC small grant (£5000) with the lauded Italian manufacturer Solari of Udine, Italy and BFI Southbank. It represents the culmination of a body of research that asks whether live data can be used as material to make artworks. Beacon was specially developed for the Tate Britain programme 40 artists 40 days, produced in conjunction with the UK Olympic Games bid and intended to “create a unique countdown calendar that will focus attention on Britain’s exceptional creative talent”. The project is exhibited by the Tate website ‘Tate Online’ presently in perpetuity. The gallery version of this work is currently held in five private collections in the USA and is shown regularly in galleries around the world. The railway flap-sign is owned by BFI Southbank and will eventually be sited there permanently. All work is developed jointly and equally between Craighead and her collaborator, Jon Thomson, (Slade).