“Never Odd or Even” seamlessly traverses the twenty-year trajectory of Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead’s practice, marked by their explorations of the World Wide Web and the (mis-)information it creates and disseminates. In their video games and installations, they present a set of narratives that, one imagines, might resemble the results as displayed to an extraterrestrial who has tapped into planet Earth’s search engines. Installed in the basement of Carroll / Fletcher’s gallery in London’s upmarket West End, Belief (2012) marks the end of the artists’ Flat Earth Trilogy. Sourced from YouTube, Google Earth, and Flickr, this video triptych ponders the effect the proliferation of online content has had on perceived reality. For the artists, the overwhelming catalog of opinions, speculations, rants, and manifestoes for which the internet provides a platform has resulted in a flattened, collapsed perception of faith or religion. Belief presents a series of clips posted on YouTube by self-anointed prophets. A young Christian woman proclaims the Fukushima earthquake as a message from God to the atheists, having shaken the shoulders of Japan and said, “Hey listen, I’m here.” A surprisingly sober Satanist in San Diego tells us that “most Satanists are really atheists: we don’t believe in …

Berlin-based Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s exhibition at Carroll / Fletcher might appear visually spare, but with each work, Haghighian draws you further into a game of institutional hide-and-seek, in which visibility and invisibility, the act of remaining hidden and being revealed, are played out as Machiavellian manipulations of the conventions of spectatorship and exhibition, where voyeurism plays a critical role. You are, in other words, being messed with, and it starts as you step into the first, storefront gallery space, occupied by what looks like typical contemporary art “sculpture” (de paso, 2012)—a wheel-on suitcase has been motorized, and it slides slowly back and forth on its belly, propped up slightly by the empty mineral water bottle over which the case’s handlebars rest. A dangling microphone picks up and amplifies the crackling of the plastic bottle. So far, so mysterious. A little adjacent gallery presents a set of associated works that extrapolate this weird sculpture: a set of printed maps and notes outline the history of the expansion of intra-European flight paths in the wake of the deregulation of the European air industry; alongside these are notes and letters sent to an English municipal council, which has agreed to 100-year licensing rights with Nestlé …