Information
Thomson & Craighead >
»Light from Tomorrow«, 2006 - 2006
Co-Workers & Funding:
ISEA Ars Council England National Maritime Museumhttp://www.lightfromtomorrow.com/
Technology
Software
The system we are using to send light from tomorrow has been specially designed and built for us by Robin Spence at Dynamic Display based in England. • A lux sensor cased in a waterproof surround runs from a PC laptop serial port to a position on a hillside about two kilometres outside of the Tongan capital Nuku'alofa.
• Software written in Visual Basic then takes the reading and transmits it to a PC connected to the lightbox in San Jose using a TCP/IP connection.
• A second software application then takes the lux reading and sends it to the lightbox as a correlated value that the white ultrabright LED's can respond to. A sliding scale exists that allows us to calibrate the responsiveness of the light panel to different ranges of lux values.
If you want to see more clearly what the light panel is made of then you might want to download this pdf document;
Descriptions & Essays
Light from Tomorrow is an artwork by British artists Thomson & Craighead.
It centres on an expedition to The Kingdom of Tonga, where tomorrow’s outdoor light-readings are broadcast in close to real time through The International Dateline to today; specifically to a lightbox installed in the San Jose Museum of Art in California as part of the group exhibition Edge Conditions. The lightbox in San Jose responds to fluctuations and broader changes in outdoor light conditions in Nuku'alofa offering a tangible connection to the future, a window quite literally onto tomorrow.
We think of the gallery component of this artwork as a romantic landscape, which is both minimal and monumental; a space for contemplation, a poetic void and an experiment in time travel. This website documents the expedition and exhibition, while forming the basis for a lecture to be given in Winter 2006 at The National Maritime Museum, which lies on the meridian in Greenwich, London.
It is part of a body of work we are making that explores our relationship with simultaneous global communcications systems and time –a series of artworks that sculpt with time in real time.
Special thanks to Robin Spence at Dynamic Displays for his work developing the lightbox and LUX light reading device. Thanks also to Elliot Young for maintaining the LUX light reader and transmission software in Kingdom of Tonga and then Wellington, New Zealand and Roger Graham at Jayex Technology for his advice developing the technology. We are also extremely grateful to Marc Santos and Tonfon for providing us with broadband internet in Kingdom of Tonga.
Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead live in both London and Kingussie. Jon is a lecturer at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, while Alison is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Art Research and Technology in Education (CARTE) at University of Westminster. A monograph on their work is published by Film and Video Umbrella, London and their work is featured in Network Art edited by Dr Tom Corby (Routledge) and Art Time & Technology by Dr Charlie Gere (Berg publishing).
Light from Tomorrow is part of the Pacific Rim artworks at The International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA 2006) and Edge Conditions at San Jose Museum of Art. Thomson & Craighead are also staging, Unprepared Piano as an invited artwork at ISEA 2006.
Literature
Archer, Michael and Julian Stallabrass. Thomson and Craighead Minigraph. London, UK: Film and Video Umbrella, 2005.
Exhibitions & Events