3. 2 Unlimited - No Limit [moon project extended mix]
4. Captain Jack - Dream A Dream (Spacefrog Mix)

The street art stencils for The Home Project were completed this week on Clanbrassil Street in Dublin. Activating heritage, community, identity and public space, the powerwasher stencils will be in situ until the foot traffic of Clanbrassil Street erases them through the accumulation of new residues and traces. Why not have a walk down Clanbrassil Street and help build new relations as the work deteriorates.

The Home Project explores the concept of 'home' against the changing landscape of the past, present and future of the Clanbrassil Street area. The words for this project are taken from a series of creative writing workshops run by Ursula Rani Sarma with 10-12 year old students living in the Clanbrassil Street area.

In 2009, curator Ian Russell worked with Ursula to create a public art installation using extracts of the students writings about 'home'. A postcard was designed in collaboration with Zero-G (which can be seen here) and was distributed throughout Dublin, and in July 2009, a selection of statements about 'home' were chosen and stenciled onto both footpaths of Clanbrassil Street using a powerwasher and a lot of friendly help and support. See the final product here.

If you would like to learn more about the development of the project, there is an artist's statement available here: 'The Origins of The Home Project' by Ursula Rani Sarma.

Ursula's artist residency in the Clanbrassil Street area was part of the Placing Voices - Voicing Places Project which was funded by a Heritage Council of Ireland INSTAR 2008 Grant, administered by University College Dublin, Create and Dublin City Council.

It's the time of year again when our streets are plastered with faces of the ambitious will-to-power types vying for a spot in national and European politics. Of course, it's important that people know how their representatives are and are able to recognise them, but there is an uncomfortable ecological feeling seeing all the paper and card and board being lashed to poles around our cities only to be later binned - all for the sake of head shots and party titles.

Putting aside the politics, a team of eco-warriors have proposed a new use for the throngs of political posters that adorn almost every corner of Dublin. Inspired by Guerrilla Gardening, the team from Unitedminds.ie have been converting political posters into ready-made window boxes for gardens. Putting the residue of excessive politics to good use, Mick Veale, one of the agent provocateurs behind the campaign, has put together a tutorial for how you can go out and turn any politician you want green...

It's not quite 'Singing in the Rain', but the use of umbrellas in Tiananmen Square by under cover Chinese police to block out international media does have a feeling of choreography about it.

Below is a short video of BBC correspondent James Reynolds in a dance with plainclothes police just opposite the square.

The internet has been around since the late 1960s when scientific researchers at UCLA and SRI in Menlo Park, California created a computer network (ARPANET) to enable real-time information sharing from their experiments. Since then, the chaotic relations of various comptuer networks grew, developed and eventually coalesced into what we know now as the internet. Initially guided by the National Science Foundation's backbone infrastructural investment of the early 1980s, the internet later was opened to commercial development and exploitation in 1988.

Today, we interact with the internet as a form of digital commons or hyper-agora. Where once priority was given to the information sharing needs of government bodies and universities, now a myriad of pop culture icons have emerged from the bundles of wires, lines of code and chaos of mouse-clicks. Though we might question whether the internet is indeed 'free' or a 'commons' (see Timothy Luke's papers on 'cyberculture'), the growing list of cybercult icons such as Numa Numa, the Dramatic Chipmunk, Fail Blog or I Can Has Cheezburger testifies to the ability of human agency to coalesce into viral and dynamic communities of interest.

Increasingly the internet-based media communities such as YouTube is shaping the media at large. With many of the topics in Greg Rutter's Definitive List of 99 Things You Should Already Have Experienced on the Internet having appeared within the content of newsbroadcasts, late night talk shows and in print media. It may seem somewhat antithetical to propose a difinitive list for internet experiences, but as you read through Greg's list, it becomes clear that that cyber pop-culture though egalitarian in formulation does lend itself to hierarchies of importance/significance.

Are we departing from an the myth of an egalitarian information sharing commons? Perhaps such 'definitive lists' of popular internet culture are a symptom of the underlying structures which define access and order of internet content. Does the assigning of significance to internet media content raise the more pertinent issue of the linguistic relationship between signs and signifiers and the structure of knowledge and communication? Should we question not just the structures of our engagement with the internet but also the method of coding that strucutre? Might we call for a 'linguistic turn' in our understanding of internet code and information architecture in general? Or is it merely a utilitarian space for infotainment?

Mother-in-law's Tongue (Sanservieria trifasciata) x 6-8 waist high plants per person

Last night witnessed the launch of the world's first ever knowledge computation engine. Wolfram Alpha is now officially available to the public to solve all your knowledge computation needs. The brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha's ambition is to be the one stop shop for formal knowledge on the web. Built on the architecture of Mathematica, the algorithmic computational acrobatics of the engine pulls source material from a broad array of authoritative sources (census reports, the Oxford English Dictionary, and countless other online databases) to present a simple and elegant interface with the world's knowledge.

The idea behind the engine is that popular search engine's such as Google or Yahoo are utilised to discover informal knowledge and broad-based web content based on the tags and page ranks of web content. Wolfram Alpha, however, searches formal knowledge structures to provide formal information to users' questions.

Designed to answer questions, Wolfram Alpha utilises a free-form natural language user interface, and it makes assumptions about search intent - referencing other possible intentions in the knowledge results. A search for 'truth' is initially assumed to be a search for a definition, but one can redirect to explore the 'general concept', or a search for 'existence' initially returns David Cronenberg's film 'eXistenZ' which can be redirected to the concept's definition.

My initial concern in using the knowledge engine was that it was an overly clean and simplistic interface that obfuscated (disguised/obscured) the complex strucutres of knowledge creation. Asserting itself as a distilled source of authoritative information, the engine was elevating itself to the level of authority. The balance this criticism, on every query-response page there is a link to 'view the source information'. Here one can see all the varied resources utilised to create the knowledge document - a bibliography of sorts. It does not however footnote any single figure of piece of information, so there is a fair degree of trust involved in using the engine that the Wolfram Computation Engine does indeed call upon reputible sources in its knowledge computations.

It is a bold step towards enriching users' experience of the web, and for now, it's free. Although being built on theories of organic computational evolution, it is a far cry from Terminator's Skynet and sentient computing - though it is a step on that road...

In an absolutely arresting talk at TED in February 2009, P. W. Singer has broadened our awareness of the frightening speed at which we are removing human arms from armed conflict. Exploring drone planes, robotic sentries and enhanced human battle technology, Singer fears the ethical and moral implications of warfare that is no longer counter balanced by lived human experience of conflict. The military-industrial complex has brought us towards tipping point where it is not longer humans who fight, but robots who fight for us.

In an age when privacies are being eroded continually through data-collection, taste-mapping and customer profiling (never mind actual government intelligence agency efforts), it might have seemed unlikely that hundreds of thousands of people would flock to broadcast their deepest personal secrets to the public. In 2004 though, that is precisely what began to happen.