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Thomson & Craighead: Desktop Documentaries

By Holly Willis
August 31, 2009
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FlatEarth.jpg

What's the future of filmmaking? That question gets asked a lot in this city and one answer might be found in the spate of experiments by artists in which, rather than writing a script and shooting footage to be edited into a completed film, makers instead compile materials found in unlikely places. One example of this can be found in the provocative work of the London-based duo Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, known as Thomson & Craighead, who find their script and imagery online. Their 2008 short Flat Earth is described as a "desktop documentary" because the material that makes up the doc consists of fragments of narrative pulled from blogs. These snippets cohere into a single storyline, thanks in part to the imagery, which also comes from online sources, including satellite imagery and Flickr photos. The project begins with a young girl stating, "I'm 13 almost 14, and I can't wait to grow up..." Another voice takes over: "A funny thing happened to me today..." And then another: "It's been 1,665 days since I had to sex..." The images initially are of the landscape from above; the camera then zooms back, until the earth is shown as a sphere. Thomson & Craighead recently premiered a similar project titled A Short Story About War. In this case, the makers focus on the topic of war, zooming around the globe to numerous troubled areas, and again, they cobble together their story from imagery and blog entries found online. What's the power of these projects? In part, they capture the plethora of voices echoing similar sentiments, and suggest storytelling happens in many places. More specifically, the imagery that zooms inward and then outward, moving from the local to the global almost instantaneously, underscores a the power of tools such as Google Earth in reconfiguring how we imagine our world. And finally, the projects participate in the notion of the database, positing not the significance of a singular story, but the power of selecting and combining - like a DJ - the materials around us.

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