Analyzing the work of Alfred Jarry, Marcel Duchamp, and Piero Manzoni, Jon Thompson discusses the abstraction of measurement and the idea of pneumatic speculation. Jon Thompson is an artist, curator and academic. By enabling students to move freely between departments when he was Head of Fine Art at Goldsmith College in the 1980s he was instrumental in changing the way the art school system in the UK worked. In 1988 he was involved in the curation of the now legendary Freeze warehouse exhibition. He also curated the acclaimed exhibitions Gravity and Grace and Falls the Shadow at the Hayward Gallery. After several years as Head of Postgraduate Studies in Fine Art at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, Jon Thompson became head of the MA Fine Art course at Middlesex University's School of Art.