Review of A Short Film About War by Thomson & Craighead.

Thou God Seest Me: Some Gathered Thoughts for A Short Film About War.

Review by Mark Cooley.

A Short Film About War is the second installment by Thomson & Craighead, in what will be a series of three "desktop documentaries." The first work in the series, "Flat Earth" establishes the context; a series of web based films constructed exclusively from media gathered from the Internet. A vast world is made smaller, more manageable, through the impossible eye that carries viewers in and out of the earth's orbit to reveal the individual voices of bloggers as lines in an elaborately staged narrative.

"You see the imagery, you know what's going on, you see what you're looking at. It's very easy when something like that is happening to project yourself there and feel a part of the battle. Like I said, your heart starts racing a little bit." - CNN interview with US-based predator drone aircraft pilot on flying air strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan from a control room in the Nevada desert.

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=356

Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead are london-based artists working with video, sound and electronic networked space to create gallery and site-specific artworks and installations. They have exhibited widely from Tate Britain to The New Museum in New York, and are among the leading UK artists using communications systems and technology in their work.

Mark Cooley is an interdisciplinary artist interested in exploring the intersections of art, activism, popular culture and institutional critique in a variety of contexts. Subjects of particular interest are U.S. foreign policy, the fine art culture industry and the political economy of new technologies. Mark is currently a professor in the Department of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason University in the suburbs of Washington D.C.


Other Info:

We are on Twitter
http://twitter.com/furtherfield

Other reviews/articles/interviews
http://www.furtherfield.org/reviews.php

The Netbehaviour list
http://www.netbehaviour.org/