Friday, 13 of November, 6.30pm

IMOCA, Lad Lane (Off Baggot Street), Dublin 2

Presenters:
Martin John Callanan is an artist whose work spans numerous media and engages both emerging and commonplace technology. His work includes translating active communication data into music; freezing in time the earth’s water system; writing thousands of letters; capturing newspapers from around the world as they are published; taming wind onto the Internet and broadcasting his precise physical location live for over two years. Martin is currently Teaching Fellow in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Jules Hackett & Paddy Cahill

Jules Hackett is an multimedia artist based in Dublin. He works with installations, digital media and live visuals. He’s currently undertaking an MA in digital art in the National College of Art & Design.

Paddy Cahill is a documentary director based in Dublin. Since graduating in 2006 from IADT, he has worked the past two years for ‘Mind the Gap Films’. He has just completed a short documentary on the Irish Times cartoonist Tom Matthews which is currently doing the festival circuit.

The music video for the band ‘the 202s’ is a frame by frame animation using a technique called rotoscoping. This process firstly involved shooting and editing video of the band. Once projected onto a surface from above, we went about drawing and photographing just under 3000 frames using 11 phonebooks in total. The video has recently been nominated for an Irish Music Video Award.

Live performance by: Benjamin Seror
Benjamin Seror (Lives and works in Paris) His work underlines links of non communication in his practices of drawing, music or writing. He aims to understand their specificities and extract possible uses. Any shape, object, colour or people produces an incalculable number of pieces of information. From anecdote to History, they reveal, their own temporalities, according to their rules. Many pieces of information echo together, others fade away. The question remains, how long this silence will keep on going, and, if the absence of understanding is necessary for understanding.

The complete story of Marina Bay
A theoretic solo-opera about the dangers of living on a volcano island.
by Benjamin Seror after a sculpture of Grégory Cuquel.

Marina Bay is a small island where the sculptor Gregory Cuquel discovered how fascinating a volcano can be. After few weeks on he Island, back in his studio, he built, in one illuminated night, a replica of the volcano he saw on the Island. At this point of this story, the theoretic opera will be a way to analyze the different faces of volcano across many legends and figures to solve this question, can a love song touch a volcano.

More information and map

Manchester's favourite psychogeographers the loiterers resistance moment (LRM) are taking over a bench in Manchester for a day and twittering the event live to us in the NCAD gallery for Space is the Place. Check out the live twitter feed

Happy Bloomsday!

If not in Dublin why not recreate your own Bloomsday wherever you may be with a Joyce Walk?

Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays edited by Christian Nold to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology based around Nold's Biomapping project.

The books is available as a free download published under a creative commons license as full quality PDF (44MB) or as a screen quality lighter download at 2 MB

The GPS track of last weeks GPS drawing walk, the word spelt out was FUCKED? (the question mark being of course crucial these days). OK it's a little hard to make out but that's a factor of my handwriting and the fact that Dublin isn't a geometric grid. Still a good time was had by all.

You can check out some images of the event including a bigger version of the track. The walk was of course organised with Tactic who are now into their last week of events as part of their residency at the Lab.

Writing the City :GPS Drawing Walk from Stunned on Vimeo.

Join me and TacTic tomorrow Friday the 13th March, 10am at Church Street Bridge ( see map) for a magical mystery tour though the streets of Dublin as we use GPS to write a giant word on the city, which can be seen later in Google Earth.

Come join in, have a walking conversation about your projects or ideas, or anything you like. If you have any experiences or scenes you want to create along the route, please let us know.

The walk will continue from 10am to about 1pm, ending with a concrete picnic. You can join in at any time and follow us on twitter or call/text 086 3667857 to find out where we are at anytime.

Vague Terrain 13 citySCENE has been launched and includes a piece I wrote about my Joyce Walks project. The issue which is curated by
Greg J. Smith indexes a wide range of strategies for representing and visualizing urban space. Drawing on the collective talent of an international pool of new media artists and scholars,
citySCENE catalogs how cartography, infrastructure and locative media shape perception in the contemporary city. Many submissions also explore more subjective urban experiences and consider notions of vision, acoustic ecology, movement and agency through experiments and
interventions staged in a number of global cities.

Contributors: Abinadi Meza, Andrea Rojas, Mattia Casalegno & Michael
Langeder, Michael Chen & Jason J. Lee, Conor McGarrigle, David Drury, Franke Dresme, Greg Giannis, Hector Centeno, Katharine S. Willis, Michael Surtees, Mitchell Whitelaw, Olga Mink, Ivan Safrin & Christian Marc Schmidt, Thomas Dreher, Tori Foster and Yukiko Bowman.

I'll be taking part in the IGV Dublin which is a mobile video projection exhibition using a converted rickshaw and a portable projector setup moving from place to place stopping to project video art onto building facades. I'll be showing on the 19th in Parnell St and Talbot St and on the 20th the festival moves to Rathmines. More information as I get it.

Urban Mobs is a project by Orange and faberNovel which visualises patterns of movement in the city based on mobile phone usage currently being exhibited in the Dans la nuit, les images exhibition. The project includes videos visualising a range of phone usage/movements in France, Spain, Romania and Poland and builds on the work of the MIT Senseable City Lab's 2006 Real Time Rome exhibition.

On a similar theme is the MIT World's Eyes project which data mines flickr photographs to track patterns of movements of tourists in Spain producing some impressive visualisations

Visualisations of mobile usage are now even available as a service for the Blackberry. In San Francisco CitySense allows the user identify nightlight hotspots based on the concentration of phone usage.The application powered by Sense Networks macrosense doesn't provide any richer data other then concentration, but the way things are going can that be really be far behind?

These visualisations of course echo Chombart de Lauwe's famous map plotting every journey a Parisienne student made in a year which so influenced Situationist thought on urban routine and the Theory Of the Derive and in some ways concretise Michel de Certeau's assertion that pedestrian movements form one of those "real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city"

While the impetus behind these and other realitymining projects is to improve knowledge about how people use mobile phones and other devices in order to design a next generation of products which better respond to actual usage requirements there are obvious implications in urban planning and it is even suggested this data can be used to improve epidemiological modelling of the spread of infectious diseases like SARS. I'm interested in them as I think they have an even more important role in visualising the extent of our datatrail, of course the upshot is that once you choose to carry a mobile phone you and your location can and will be tracked, anonymously or otherwise, and the smarter your phone the more data there is to mine.

On that note I leave you with the beautiful BBC Britain from Above visualisations

I've been doing a bit of research into GPS and I've been struck by the number of stories of Satnav disasters that are in the media. They seem to fall into two broad categories. The first is foolish technologically naive people who treat GPS as a magical device trusting it rather then the evidence of their own senses and end up driving into a river/lake/train track. The second is a more technophobic take where blameless individuals are lead into harms way by faulty technology, often in 'strange foreign places'. I'm reading Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were New which deals with the social and cultural history of the telephone and the electric light and there is a remarkable and telling correspondence between the contemporaneous 19th century accounts of electrical mishaps she recounts and these tales of GPS disasters.

Anyway I thought I'd share a small round-up of some of these GPS disasters.

GPS guides Norwegian tourists into trouble in Rio

£96,000 Merc written off as satnav leads woman astray|

GPS drivers led astray by the Northern lights

GPS leading drivers astray

GPS failure leads to Utah tourist debacle

Driver follows GPS onto pedestrian walkway, into cherry tree

Faulty GPS lures honeymooners astray

GPS routed bus under bridge, company says

Motorist has faith in GPS, drives into sandpile

UK drivers trust GPS more than their own eyes

GPS leads woman astray near Sweet Springs, cell phone helps her get back on track

Bogus signals send sat navs astray

Heritage Ireland give Brú na Bóinne co-ordinates to stop visitors driving into Newgrange

Sat-nav directions send Ring of Kerry tourists wrong way round the bend

Sat-nav 'trapped' lorry for days

Village shaken by GPS-driven tank invasion

U.S. Tourist Stoned by Palestinian Mob After GPS Gives Incorrect Directions.

Whom Do You Believe, G.P.S. or Your Own Eyes?

Driver Blames G.P.S. for Accident on Metro-North Tracks

Driver follows sat-nav into lake

SatNav danger revealed: Navigation device blamed for causing 300,000 crashes

Lie way code - Don't trust your satnav signs in Wales

Forget satnav, if you want to know your way just ask

Satnav leads minibus into river

Car on rail line in sat-nav mishap

Steered Wrong: Drivers Trust GPS Even to a Fault

Interview with Hamish Fulton via talking walking

A late follow up on 1000 Joyce Walks, as I mentioned earlier the project was a great success the final tally is we had walks in 39 cities (multiple walks in many cities) throughout the world. I'll be adding more walks to the gallery over the next while. Thanks to everyone who participated and if you took part please don't forget to document your walk.

The map above is one of my Bloomsday walks in Berlin click here for the full size mashup

I'll be in Manchester tomorrow doing a psychogeographical walk - The Manchester Freedom Trail as part of the Loiterers Resistance Movement Get Lost festival and attending the TRIP conference. If you're in Manchester please join me.

A quick word about Bloomsday, it all went really well with a lot of walks created all over the world, I owe a big thank you to all the people who took part and made it such a big success. I'll write about it in more detail when I get all the information about what happened where. I was fortunate enough to spend Bloomsday in Berlin where I did a fantastic Joycewalk full of improbable coincidence - I'll upload the documentation as soon as I can on my return.

It's Bloomsday and 1000 Joyce Walks the project which lets you re-enact Bloomsday where-ever you are. We have walks in over 25 cities around the world already planned but it's not too late to join in and celebrate Bloomsday in the psychogeographical way. Click here for more details.

Tomorrow is Bloomsday and 1000 Joyce Walks. There's been a huge interest and we've got walks planned all over the world, from Berlin to Boston, Marakesh to Montevideo and everywhere in between. It's shaping up to be a great day.

There's still time to join in and do a walk tomorrow go to the Joyce Walks site and create your own walk where ever you'll be tomorrow.

There are only six days left to Bloomsday and the 1000 Joyce Walks psychogeography project. Sign up now to participate.

What: 1000 Joyce Walks

How: Generate a map and walk in your city

I'm now seeking participants a new project 1000 Joyce Walks taking place on June 16th (Bloomsday) 2008.

1000 Joyce Walks is a participatory global intervention which aims to create a day of psychogeographical exploration with 1000 interventions in 24 hours across the globe.

The project uses the Joyce Walks project to remap routes from James Joyce's Ulysses to any city in the world to be used as the basis of walks which navigate urban space in a new and unexpected way .

Participation is easy all you have to do is -
- Use the Joyce Walks website to generate a walk in any city of your
choice,
- invite your friends and peer group to join you on your walk
- document the experience simply with some photos and/or videos,
- use the Joyce Walks site to generate a googlemaps mashup of your walk
to be shared on the Joyce Walks site or embedded on any webpage

More information available here

UPDATE As expected it is both fake and a cheesy guerilla marketing campaign for some company, still a nice illustration of the thin line that some locative media work threads.

The biggest drawing in the world by Eric Nordenankar in which he sent a GPS enabled suitcase around the world with the tracklog making the drawing. While at first glance it's a really cool idea it becomes a bit like an extended guerilla promo for DHL and left me hoping that it's an elaborate put-on, in which case it is cool otherwise it's hard to see it other than art 1 planet 0.

I'm a little late with this one but I must mention that Blackletter.ie have launched their Art Finder Google Maps mashup which locates and archives art projects/events which have taken place outside of the gallery. Already an important archival resource for temporary and location based artworks it also has the facility for artists to easily add projects to the database which should ensure that it will be a dynamic rather then a static archive of ephemeral art practice.

Dublin 24 my video projection on The Irish Times building in Tara street has now ended after a successful run as part of the Science Gallery's Lightwave exhibition. The exhibition has been extended until the 1st of March due to popular demand - there have been queues every day - but unfortunately the projectors in the Irish Times were pre-booked for the original exhibition end so Dublin 24 had to come down. I've put some photos up on my Flickr page and will have some more shortly

DATA 27.0 - in association with LIGHTWAVE festival takes place today at 8pm in the Science Gallery Featuring presentations by Benjamin Gaulon & Lourens Rozema (E-waste 3.0), Dmitry Gelfand & Evelina Domnitch (Camera Lucida), Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus (Lo-Vid), Neil O'Connor with Eoghan Kidney (Somadrone) and more... as usual all welcome and admission is free.

In other Lightwave news my project Dublin 24 experienced some problems over the weekend with a projector breakdown and some other problems but I am glad to say that it is now once more up and running and can be seen 24 hours a day in the Irish Times building 24 Tara Street.

I'll be launching Dublin 24 a new three channel video projection which will be projected on the Irish Times building in Tara Street this Friday as part of the Lightwave festival. The work tells the story of a single 24 hour period in Dublin as seen by over 120 traffic cameras.

The exhibition continues until the 9th February

View Larger Map

Joyce Walks is showing at the 21st Stuttgarter Filmwinter in the international competition for online media. Exhibition runs from the 17th -20th at the Filmhaus Stuttgart.

After Edushi.com City8.com is another very cool Chinese mapping site offering 360° street view for 21 Chinese cities.