'The future ain't what it used to be.' So said Yogi Berra, and so too say artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead (of the British duo Thomson and Craighead) in a recent interview in the quarterly web journal Vague Terrain. Looking forward through the lens of history is one of the many strands that runs through the work Thomson and Craighead. Their early online work, Trigger Happy (which is included in Rhizome's Artbase), is a 'mashup' of Roland Barthes's 'Death of the Author' essay and the vintage arcade game 'Space Invaders.' The piece reflects the range of historical influence on new media art. Automated Beacon, a live stream of internet search queries, juxtaposes ideas of immediacy and desire from a distanced perspective, while Light From Tomorrow literally sends light from the future into the present by working across time zones. Flat Earth is a new animation created in conjunction with the UK's Channel Four Television. Billed as a 'desktop documentary,' the piece compiles texts from blogs and freely-available satellite imagery to create a narrative slice of our world, now, and what is soon to be our past. Whether embracing the old to reflect the new or vice versa, Thomson and Craighead play not only with the critical tensions between past, present, and future, but also the role of technology within that timeline.