London Wall: Thomson & Craighead

Until 5 Sep 2010

The opening of the new Galleries of Modern London will be accompanied by an interactive installation by digital artists Thomson & Craighead. London Wall sees the artists fly-posting the Museum's foyer to create a collage of words and images by Londoners about their city.

London Wall (sketch), Thomson & Craighead, 2010 © the artist

Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead are fascinated by the way global communications networks, such as the internet, transform the way we perceive and understand our world. They use these new media to make web-based art, as well as installations for galleries and, occasionally, outdoor sites. Thomson and Craighead live and work in London and Scotland.

London Wall builds on their interest in social networks to create a snapshot of tweeting and texting activity over a defined period.

Getting your tweets & text messages 'heard'

From 28 May until 6 June 2010, Thomson and Craighead listened to publicly available tweets and texts sent within a three-mile radius of the Museum of London, including visitors to the museum, who could participate via Twitter and text messages.

The end result

The artists then typeset selected tweets and text messages and printed them out as A3 posters with a date and time tag. The posters were then pasted up in the museum’s foyer in a chronological order. On reaching the end of the wall, the artists went back to the beginning and started again. The finished wall presents social networking activity almost as a kind of concrete poetry, in which complaints about public transport and skipped breakfasts segue into fashion tips and plans for evenings out.

The exhibition runs until 5 September 2010.