Thornton's experimental work explores the subversive and the mysterious, the unwritten history of film and video. Using media as a medium through which one can think, with a fluidity similar to that of writing, she uses production as an exploratory process, with each work part of an ongoing investigation of meaning and form. Subject matter, politics, aesthetics and form are co-extensive. Thornton creates the media equivalent of poems, essays and experimental fiction, with each work evoking small revelations.

"I am concerned with the aesthetics of time-based media, the aesthetics of narrative, and with the 'politics of the image,' or, in other words, with who controls the production of images, and to what end. I regard my commitment to formal exploration as political. What I mean to suggest and uphold in my work is that the media arts have had, and will continue to have many histories, and that the syntax of form, as well as content, is very much open territory."