Thomson & Craighead

Aggravating, demonic, invasive, absurd, disrupting, e-Poltergeist is typical of the work of this team of British new media artists Thomson & Craighead. Inspired by a suicide note that had advertised itself through HTML to search engines using metatags, e-Poltergeist is an intervention into our familiar notions of what a browser is. You are cautioned upon entering to “save whatever you’re doing and close all other running applications. Do you Yahoo?” and then all hell breaks loose as fragments of search-engine results start peppering your screen until you have little recourse other than restarting your computer. Live queries for “Anyone there,” “Please listen,” and “Help me,” burst upon the desktop. The piece does draw upon current Yahoo searches and so is responsive to the changes in Yahoo, the information available on the web, and current cultural moods. Users might be drowned in the pulsating flashes of windows, or conversely they might stumble onto some unexpected back corner of the web with relevant, if arcane, information. The work, which is eerily silent for a piece so animated, images our experience of information search and retrieval on the web, not as a direct cause-and-effect linear narrative, but as a fragmented, poltergeistlike chaos of fragments that cannibalize the established order.

Return to Artists page