Telephone: 020 7911 5000
Email: craigha@westminster.ac.uk
Postal: University of Westminster, Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies,
32-38 Wells Street,
London, W1T 3UW

Position: Reader in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture

Biography

Alison Craighead is Reader in contemporary art and visual culture at University of Westminster and also lectures in fine art at Goldsmiths University, London.  She works as a visual artist in collaboration with Jon Thomson (The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London) making artworks and installations for galleries, online and sometimes outdoors. Much of their recent work explores how trends of globalisation and global communications networks are re-shaping the way we all perceive and understand the world around us.

Research Areas

Alison is currently building a research network investigating the legacy of the French collective Oulipo and its enduring relationship with interdisciplinary artistic practices.  She is particularly interested in how Oulipo's constrained writing techniques continue to inform contemporary art.  She is also involved with the development of an interdisciplinary research project based at University College London, which looks at how animation and its concepts are informing the digital moving image in contemporary visual art. Her collaborative research with Jon Thomson continues to explore relationships between data visualization and cinema –a recent example being their narrative documentary artwork A Short film about War, where viewers are taken around the world to a selection of war zones as seen through the collective eyes of the online photo sharing community Flickr, and as witnessed by military and civilian bloggers.  Their research also looks more generally at how real time processes and live data transmission can be used as a material or artistic medium.

Selected Exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions                                       
2010 Highland Institute of Contemporary Art (H-I-C-A), Scotland
2010  London Wall. Museum of London.
2008 Moderna Museet, Stockholm
2006 Neuberger Museum of Modern Art, New York
2006 Mejan labs, Stockholm
2004 The Media Centre, Huddersfield.
2002 Mobile Home, London
2002 V2, Rotterdam
2000 Mobile Home, London
1999 Cambridge Darkroom Gallery
1997 30 Underwood St Gallery, London

Selected Group Exhibitions
2010 Several Interruptions. Urban Video Project, Syracuse, New York,
2010 Subjective Projections, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Germany
2010 A Short Film about War. MyWar, FACT Liverpool & International Touring.
2009 They told you so, Bitforms, New York
2009 Friends of the Divded Mind, Royal College of Art, London
2009 Timecode, Dundee Contemporary Arts
2008 The New Normal, Artists Space, New York & Touring
2007 Accumulated Outlook, Oakville Gallery, Canada
2007 BEACON BFI, London.
2007 Feedback, Laboral Gallery, Gijon, Spain
2006 Edge Conditions, San Jose Museum of Art, California.
2005 40 artists 40 days, Tate Online, UK
2004 Database Imaginary, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Canada & Touring
2004 Algorithmic Revolutions , ZKM, Karlsruhe Germany
2004 Passage of Mirage, Chelsea Museum, New York.
2002 Driving through Las Vegas. Re:mote, Photographers Gallery, London.
2001 Artcade, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.
2001 Art & Money Online , Tate Britain, London.
2001 010101, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.

PERMANENT OUTDOOR WORKS
2008 Decorative Newsfeeds, The Junction, Cambridge
2006 Decorative Newsfeeds, Forest Hill, London

Selected Publications

Thomson & Craighead, by Julian Stallabrass & Michael Archer, editor Steven Bode
Network Art: Practices and Positions, editor Dr Tom Corby
New Media Art: Practice and context in UK, 1994 – 2004, editor Lucy Kimbell

Awards

2005 Winners of an Arts Foundation fellowship
2004 Fellows at The MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire, USA

Website

Blog     http://thomson-craighead.blogspot.com
Archive: http://www.thomson-craighead.net