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It's 5:00 P.M. on a weekday, friend
There's one of me and two million of them
The whistle blows and the factories close
There's a million more commuters on the access roads
The brake lights flash--there's an RV crashed
I'm in the passing lane going nowhere fast
The traffic crawls and the engine stalls
I'm stuck on the edge of the urban sprawl
Warren Zevon
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According to Google they "mistakenly collected unencrypted WiFi payload data (information sent over networks) using our Street View cars."
They have never admitted however how this so-called "mistake" occurred. Nothing held on private networks can have any impact on the usability of Street view, so why did the project "collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) ..." in the first place? Surely all they needed was GPS and a huge disk to hold the video data.
We all know the state collects and holds private information about virtually everyone and moreover has the capacity to correlate that data across the board. Now we have it confirmed that a large public company, with a pretty dodgy record on privacy and human rights is doing the same thing.
What is building before our eyes is a corporate state of even greater power than that envisaged by Italian fascism in the '20s and '30s. Huge companies like Google or Microsoft can only exist in mutual parasitism with the state. Somehow we have to find ways to curb not just the centralising powers of the state, but the same tendency in the corporates that dominate our economic life. It may be too late of course - try searching the web without using Google or Bing, Microsoft or Apple - it can be done, but much less effectively.
You should start by securing your WiFi network! Other possibilities include anonymising proxy servers and anonymised e-mail services. Of course by using such services yoou run the risk of drawing attention to yourself, because the state will assume that anyone hiding themselves behind anonymity is a potential threat.
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A few years back I visited the new Dundrum shopping centre in the south of Dublin. Very glossy, but still essentially like any shopping centre anywhere in the world. I took a few photographs though, of which this is one. I still think of this as a photograph, not a digital print. like those I have posted over the past few days. To me it is still recognisably photographic in origin and this is the test I apply in describing work.
Of course places like this were built on the back of Ireland's economic boom times. I suspect it is a rather sad place to be now.
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I did a painting course a few weeks ago on abstract painting. While in the studio, I noticed lots of interesting textures on the easels caused by splashes of paint over the years. I only had a small digital compact with me so I wasn't able to get very good photos. However the shapes and colours formed the starting point for a series of digital prints of which this is one.
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A week or so ago, while browsing through Flickr, I came across some pictures of rock carvings in Northumberland and North Yorkshire taken by Brian Kerr.
These are of course brilliant photographs of difficult subjects, but it was the carvings themselves that grabbed me. Living as I do not far from two of the most famous examples of standing stones in the world, at Avebury and Stonehenge, I was aware that the so-called Stone Age was by no means as benighted a time as popular culture would have it. However Stonehenge and Avebury, andf their counterparts in Carnac, Brittany seem somehow remote and even a bit ‘corporate’. In contrast, these relatively crudely carved symbols spoke to me in a very personal way. They are the work of individuals and somehow that individuality still shines though after 6000 years. My first reaction was to start drawing these simple shapes in a sketch book with charcoal or pastel. I uploaded some of these to Flickr. Some examples are here.
I’m now planning to take these themes further into some prints, probably collagraph or monotype, although if I can get the kit ready, I may also try some solar etchings. In the interim, I have been playing with them digitally.
I can see this one as a monotype, although a mixture of collagraph and monoprinting is another possibility. 
I can see this one as a collagraph, using fabric and discs of canvas or card. The circles could be drawn or painted in afterwards. Another possibility is for the textured background to be made as a collagraph and the circle shapes collaged on top. This is as far as I’ve got, although I have some other collagraph plates ready to go. Watch this space for more to come.
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