Pocket cinema: Flat Earth by Thomson & Craighead

Here’s very cool documentary ‘Flat Earth’ by Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead from 2007. It’s a sort of a visual tribute to the global use of internet, blogs and digital intimate thoughts shared by millions ‘anonymous’ users through digital waves…

Thomson & Craighead, duo that explores the concept of our comprehension and perception of the media, specifically the internet, are well known for their sound and video workz. So far, they exhibited their artworkz in Zentrum Kunst Media ZKM, Tate Gallery, Laboral Art Centre, The New Museum, etc…

Poster Flat Earth by Thomson & Craighead taken from Rhizome

Synopsis:
‘Flat Earth is a desktop documentary, which takes the viewer on a seven minute trip around the world so that we encounter a series of fragments taken from real peoples’ blogs. These fragments are knitted together to form a kind of story or singular narrative.

The visual effect is not unlike that of Google Earth, although significantly here, nearly all of the visual material for, “Flat Earth” is taken from satellite imagery freely available on the web. This is with the exception of the close-up imagery from outside USA, which had to be paid for non-commercial use and a series of images taken from Flickr under Creative Commons attribution license’.