I’m off to Italy on my ( 100% computer free) holidays ’till June 10th so no posts for a while.
I’ve just put up a the beginnings of a reorganisation of the Stunned site -I know not a great idea to do at the last moment when there’ll be no chance to fix mistakes for a fortnight but I’ll take my chances and if I screw it up, so be it.
On the 50th anniversary some Everest links – a very cool 360degree panorama from the summit of Everest.
And a good site for the Irish Everest 2003 expedition which recently put Michael Murphy and Gerard McDonnell on the summit.

It’s official, we’ve suspected it for a long time but now the state policy advisory board Forfas’s Consumer Pricing Report finds that the level of prices here is 12% above the euro zone average.

Cat Power is going to be on Later this Friday 23rd, 11.35 BBC2, worth checking out.
And from the sublime to the ridiculous Tom Petty – yeah I though he was dead too – has cancelled a European tour because he is afraid that terrorists are planning to attack him – I suspect that if in the unlikely event that he’d be on a terrorist hit list they’d have struck him off about ten years ago on the grounds that he was already dead.
Normally this wouldn’t bother me but I had the gig to design the site for his Irish appearance so now it’s personal.

A picture taken at the big antiwar protest on Feb 15th – I’ve just got around to developing the film and printing some photos the joys of good old fashioned b&w technology.

Remember Private Jessica Lynch and that rescue, well it turns out it was all staged. Why am I not surprised?
“It was like a Hollywood film. They cried, ‘Go, go, go’, with guns and blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show – an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking down doors.” All the time with the camera rolling

The Government seems certain to bring back university fees Bertie’s arguement is that fees will only be brought back for the super rich and that the saved money will be used to assist students from low income families to attend University.
Well I worked my way through college, paying fees while being assessed on my parent’s income. I was once told by a Professor that I had no business being in college if I couldn’t afford to pay the fees without working an attitude which probably has more to do with lack of lower income students in college then anything else.
If we’ve learnt anything over the last fees years we’ve learnt that
-the rich in Ireland don’t have taxable incomes.
-taxes and schemes which will be targeted at the very rich have a way of moving to the average PAYE taxpayer while the very rich use their tax accountants and/or brown paper envelopes to find a loophole.
-money saved by the government to be used for the disadvantaged is never used for the disadvantaged
The fees if they are introduced will be (RTE’s Feargal Keane’s figures can’t find a link to them)
Arts €3,600 p.a.
Science € 4,790 p.a.
Med € 5,700 p.a.
Vet € 6,500 p.a.
Still after today’s poll results maybe Bertie will have a rethink.

Steve Albini’s interesting breakdown of the real costs of a standard record company contract, with the usual Steve Albini warning.
So now that the Walker has axed media arts, what will happen their extensive archive? The Walker’s Director told the NY Times thatshe intended to keep the projects online but could not commit to doing so until the cost was determined . Shades of the Arthouse experience. Get the downloaders out.

The Walker Arts Centre has essentially axed it’s New Media program and fired curator Steve Deitz. The Walker was one of the first (if not the first) museums internationally to take new media and more specifically net art seriously. It’s a great loss to see it go but I’ve had a gut feeling for some time that this kind of act stems from a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of net art – or perhaps a better understanding then I give them credit for in that they realise that net art exists with or without the museum’s patronage and this fact makes them nervous – on the part of museum curators.
On a related theme an interesting Matt Mirapaul piece on the NY Digital Art Salon.
This just feeds my growing doubt as to whether net art has any place in the institutional museum at all.

The NY Times tries to get to grips with Ali G in Da USAii . I’ve got to admit that I thought he was finished after the last series on Channel 4 but it looks like he could run for ever in the US I don’t think they’ll ever catch on.
Interesting Lukas Moodysson interview
Thomas Pynchon introduction to a new version of 1984 argues that Orwell’s vision wasn’t far off.

Lo-Fi.org is one of those sites that consistently baffle me. It’s a good net.art portal site that shows interesting work, very artist centered – pretty much the kind of thing I like but.. (there’s always a but) I hardly ever visit it because the design is so bad that the site is unusable. It’s one of those sites that pop-up a tiny window (450 px wide) which you can’t resize, it then breaks this into four frames, the backgrounds make the text hard to read… at this stage I get a headache and give up. Pity