Work In Progress

James Joyce wrote between 1914 and 1922 what has been described as the best literary work of the Twentieth Century: Ulysses. The novel tells the story of one day (Thursday, 16th June 1904) in the life of Dublin, following the steps of advertising salesman Leopold Bloom as he walks around the city. The book is divided into 18 chapters, each written in a different literary style, all corresponding to episodes of Homer’s Odyssey. Taking references from the story of the most renowned hero in Antiquity, Joyce turns the wanderings of an ordinary man into an epical journey into the life and culture of the city of Dublin, as well as into literature itself. In doing so, he developed a masterpiece whose complexity led to a myriad of interpretations and readings, which are still being discussed by scholars today.

A new reading of Ulysses is being developed by Irish net artist Conor McGarrigle, who has set himself the task of creating a series of pieces based upon James Joyce’s novel. The project is unusually large in scale for a net art piece. As McGarrigle puts it:

“It’s a big project, but it’s something I wanted to do, because I wanted to start a project that I could work on over a long period of time, because a lot of what I did before was short, self-contained and have no follow-on, which is how a lot of net art is like”.

But it is not just a long term project, it is also ambitious and risk-taking to work on such important literary reference. McGarrigle admits the complexity of this task and specifies the limitations to it:

“I am not going to do Joyce, I am not going to try to do ‘Ulysses online’, because that would be crazy. What I want to do is tell a story, a different story but use the structure of Ulysses”.

Just as Joyce used Homer’s structure for the Odyssey because he “couldn’t make a better one”, McGarrigle uses Joyce to tell his story about Dublin:

“I couldn’t beat Joyce’s structure, so I would use the same, but also because Joyce’s Ulysses is so caught up with Dublin… the Dublin we have today is Joyce’s Dublin”.

The net artist has already created two of the eighteen pieces to shape his version of Ulysses. The first piece, Cyclops refers to chapter 12 in the book, in which Leopold Bloom enters Barney Kiernan’s pub and discusses with a fierce nationalist named the Citizen, a scene that an unnamed narrator describes. McGarrigle sets this piece in Temple Bar (Dublin’s “official cultural quarter”), where artist Artie Doyle (his everyman equivalent to Leopold Bloom) is constantly watched by four surveillance cameras: these represent both the single-eyed Cyclops of Homer’s Odyssey and the anonymous narrator in Joyce’s Ulysses. Each camera controls a different zone. In zone 1, Artie Doyle walks next to the Arthouse building, a former multimedia centre for the arts now closed. The windows of the building have been replaced by moving images of anti-war protests. Just as Joyce projected his literary vision of Dublin onto the real city, so does McGarrigle with a digitally manipulated vision that he defines as an “enhanced city”. In zone 2, Artie meets Clancy, the art critic, and they have a conversation which mirrors that of Bloom and the Citizen. McGarrigle reproduces sentences heard from artists and curators in Dublin. The willingness to exclude foreigners from Ireland manifested by the Citizen in Joyce’s book is turned into the exclusion of emerging artists from the art world. In zone 3, Artie is caught in a fog of names of Irish artists, which recalls the Citizen’s list of Irish Heroes of antiquity. Once again, it is tradition preventing the emergence of new art. Finally, in zone 4, the user takes the Cyclops (or narrator) role in observing passersby and revealing their thoughts, just as Joyce does using the interior monologue in his characters. All in all, the piece is mainly narrative, permitting a limited interaction, although it is in some cases presented as an open system (the surveillance camera images, for instance, are not real-time webcam shots, but still images which compose a closed animation). McGarrigle admits to this:

“I started with something more self-contained, no interaction whatsoever, but I see more as it moves on, maybe add some collaborative pieces where I work with other artists, and then pieces where users can interact with them. But it’s an early stage, so as I look into each episode, I think about how it will be done, and then when it comes to a certain size, I will have to link them all, but that is another challenge”.

The second piece in the series is Proteus, which is based upon chapter 3 of Ulysses, in which Stephen Dedalus walks along the beach in Sandymount strand. Joyce uses in this chapter the technique of stream of consciousness to reveal Stephen’s thoughts. In McGarrigle’s piece, the walk along Sandymount is replaced by the more contemporary trip in a DART train that takes Artie Doyle to Dublin’s city centre. This is a meditation piece in which there is no interaction because we are invited to watch Artie’s thoughts display in a stream of pictures as the train passes by the serene skyline of Sandymount beach. Finally, the image fades to black as we are moved to interrogate “the ineluctable modality of the visible”: we close our eyes but still hear the train bumping on the tracks. The world is still there.

In these two pieces, McGarrigle successfully combines Joycean references with contemporary situations, thus taking Joyce’s novel to today’s Dublin whilst creating a different story. Still, there are sixteen more chapters and many possible readings for each of them. Joyce used a different point of view and literary style for each chapter, and McGarrigle likely does the same, incorporating the many different techniques already displayed in net artworks.