Light from Tomorrow

thomson & craighead light for tomorrow
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Light from Tomorrow is an artwork by British artists Thomson & Craighead.

It centres on an expedition to The Kingdom of Tonga, where tomorrow’s outdoor light-readings are broadcast in close to real time through The International Dateline to today; specifically to a lightbox installed in the San Jose Museum of Art in California as part of the group exhibition Edge Conditions. The lightbox in San Jose responds to fluctuations and broader changes in outdoor light conditions in Nuku'alofa offering a tangible connection to the future, a window quite literally onto tomorrow.

We think of the gallery component of this artwork as a romantic landscape, which is both minimal and monumental; a space for contemplation, a poetic void and an experiment in time travel. This website documents the expedition and exhibition, while forming the basis for a lecture to be given in Winter 2006 at The National Maritime Museum, which lies on the meridian in Greenwich, London.

It is part of a body of work we are making that explores our relationship with simultaneous global communcications systems and time –a series of artworks that sculpt with time in real time.
Special thanks to Robin Spence at Dynamic Displays for his work developing the lightbox and LUX light reading device. Thanks also to Elliot Young for maintaining the LUX light reader and transmission software in Kingdom of Tonga and then Wellington, New Zealand and Roger Graham at Jayex Technology for his advice developing the technology. We are also extremely grateful to Marc Santos and Tonfon for providing us with broadband internet in Kingdom of Tonga.

Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead live in both London and Kingussie. Jon is a lecturer at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, while Alison is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Art Research and Technology in Education (CARTE) at University of Westminster. A monograph on their work is published by Film and Video Umbrella, London and their work is featured in Network Art edited by Dr Tom Corby (Routledge) and Art Time & Technology by Dr Charlie Gere (Berg publishing).

Light from Tomorrow is part of the Pacific Rim artworks at The International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA 2006) and Edge Conditions at San Jose Museum of Art. Thomson & Craighead are also staging, Unprepared Piano as an invited artwork at ISEA 2006.