Graffiti with light from Lichtfaktor
My western digital 500GB external drive (ad byline put your life on it) that just gave up after only 2 months taking with it some important backups from recent work. This drive didn’t fail in any obvious way, no noise, no problem putting data onto it in fact I only noticed the first time I tried to get something off it. I’m still very slowly assessing he damage – the only way to know for sure is to try and get them off the disk, if I can they’re OK if not …well. After running diagnostics I discovered the disk had failed the reallocated sector count test. Needless to say if you’re thinking of buying this drive don’t. I’ve written a review for Pixmania where I bought the drive but so far they have not published it – I’ve written to them asking them why and will keep you informed on whether their user reviews are phony PR or not.
Update: 16th July Some pictures of the velib bikes taken on the opening day and a (very poor quality taken using the video fuction of a compact digital camera at night, I’m away from home so I don’t have the facilities to add a cool sountrack to the video) video of my first trip on the velib bikes. My first impression of the scheme is that despite some teething problems it works very well the bikes are great and the system is easy to use, the main problem is getting one as the whole of Paris seems to be velib crazy.
Velib is the amazing public bike plan underway in Paris due to launch on the 15th of July where they are providing 20,600 bicycles in 1450 points with first 30 minutes free of charge and a sliding scale for subsequent 30 min periods. I’ll be in Paris in July and I’m already looking forward to doing it on bike. Maybe our new ‘green’ government will do this in Dublin (to make up for Tara, Shannon, Corrib gas etc)? On a related note a nice piece by David Byrne on the joys of cycling in New York.
DATA, Dublin Art and Technology Association is back to kic=k off Darklight this Thursday in Filmbase featuring
Benjamin Gaulon – de Pong Game, the Res, PrintBall™
Blackletter.ie
John Buckey and David Walker – The Kingdom
Paul Makepeace – paulm.com
To celebrate Bloomsday I’d like to invite everyone to take part in a Bloomsday psychogeographical event by undertaking their own Bloomsday re-enactments in any city in the world except Dublin.
To take part generate your own Bloomsday route using Joyce Walks a web 2.0 service which generates walking maps based on routes from Joyce’s Ulysses for any city in the world. Based on the map create your own Bloomsday event documenting it as you go and use Joyce Walks to generate a mashup of your walk which will be saved to a database as a permanent record of the event.
More information here
The site has been down all morning due to my hosting company hosting365 losing all power to their servers (they’re supposed to have backup servers but they went too) it’s especially annoying coming so soon after the launch of Joyce Walks so apologies to everyone who was trying to get on the site. It’s time to change hosting.
I’m pleased to announce the launch of the beta version of my new project Joyce Walks.
Joyce Walks a new project by Conor McGarrigle
Because somewhere, sometimes it’s always Bloomsday.
Every June 16th in Dublin Joyce enthusiasts celebrate Bloomsday with re-enactments of events from Ulysses. Unfortunately not everyone can be in Dublin for that day but why should that stop you celebrating Bloomsday where you want when you want .So as Bloomsday approaches we
announce Joyce Walks a web 2.0 service which will let you map routes from Ulysses to any city in the world so that Bloomsday can be celebrated in any place at any time.
Joyce Walks is a psychogeographical tool which generates walking maps based on routes from James Joyce’s Ulysses in any city in the world using Google Maps. The system prints maps to be used as the basis of walks exploring the city of your choice and generates mashups using your pictures and videos documenting these walks to share with other users.
Inspired by the Situationist idea of the Dérive Joyce Walks seeks to provide the walker a means of exploring the urban environment which is unique, truly random but removed from a reliance on chance. Although based on a fixed route each map generated is unique as it is based on an individual selection by the user of the center point of their chosen city thus every map provides the walker a means of exploring the urban environment which although based on routes which are predetermined according to a strict adherence to a text is individual to them. Of course removing these routes from Dublin removes specific spatial relevance but they still retain an aura of association which creates a link between the locations and Joycean Dublin.
Joyce Walks saves every map generated to a database. These walks, in addition to being specific to their creator, form part of a continuum where each specific walk performed by any user of the system is added to an searchable archive of unique performative walks from around the world. This archive over time will become a tool to explore and view many unique walks in many cities around the world creating a veritable web 2.0 psychogeographical rough guide.
Launch the Project
Requirements:
Firefox or Safari browser , in this beta version Internet Explorer is not supported, support for IE will be added shortly.
Due to copyright issues between Google and the British Ordnance Survey cities in the UK and Northern Ireland are not searchable, we are working to find a solution for this.
Christina McPhee presents large-scale photoworks, video and high-definition video from her acclaimed Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries, a meditation on seismic memory and identity along the San Andreas Fault in California, exploring the synchronicity between natural disaster and human trauma at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington DC June 5-July 29
1,001 Ming- and Qing-dynasty chairs a component of Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale project for Documenta in which he will gather
1,001 Chinese people from the artist’s sprawling, blog-mediated social network, give them matching clothes and luggage, fly them en bloc to Kassel, billet them on bamboo bunks in Ai-designed temporary quarters inside an old textile factory, and set them to wandering the city for the three-month duration of the show, which opens June 16. A spokesperson at Ai’s studio says, To design also means to set up a condition, which makes individuals change. The project is about a new way to communicate, to participate, a new spiritual condition..
The current issue of Circa magazine features New-Media Art: An Irish Context a survey of Irish new media art by NCAD’s Paul O’Brien which features among others myself, Paul Murnaghan, Saoirse Higgins, Benjamin Gaulon, Jonah Brucker Cohen, John Gerrard, Eamonn Crudden, Kevin Atherton and Tim Redfern. Worth checking out.
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WalkSpace for the iPhone is an alternative walking app to let you navigate the city in a new and unexpected way.
