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Category Archives: Art

Weekend with Art, hacking, art and brains

Friday evening, we went to see the Old Irish Radio Show at The Loft @ The Locke. It was an interesting and entertaining take on how radio used to be in Ireland. Great venue!

Saturday started with 3Dcamp at UL with a number of interesting talks and demos.

I had to leave during the afternoon for a while as the Limerick School of Art and Design opened their end-of-year show.

I only had time to see about half of the exhibition and will have to get back there again during the coming week.

After this, back to UL for Prof. William O’Connor‘s highly stimulating talk about “Is the Internet changing your brain?”.

Virtual trad and hyper-trad instruments

During the Sounding Object project, we researched and developed new approaches for sound on computers, responsive to physical interaction and easily matched to physical objects. One of the demos was the Vodhran, a virtual Irish Bodhran drum. The performers gestures are tracked using a Polhemus Fastrak 6-DOF electromagnetic tracker in realtime and the sound synthesized in real-time by our sound object models.


This summer, I’m planning to make another version of this, probably the Hodhran – a Hyper-bodhran, using a real bodhran, parts of a Wii controller, an Arduino and a few sensors (such as force sensitive resistors and bend sensors).

in_flux in Limerick City 2011

I went to see the last day of the exhibition in_flux hosted by Occupy Space in Limerick City. It has been really amazing to see how Ireland in recession suddenly starts to show more creativity than ever before.
Other countries have re-appropriated industrial spaces into social and artistic places for many years.
As far as I have seen, this rarely happened in Ireland. But now, we have newly built, sometimes not even finished buildings and structures that are unlikely to ever become what they were supposed to be, or finished, becoming great low-cost places for artistic exploration and social interaction.

The Ghost of Catherine Street?



A taxonomy of crispy things