dorian moore : arts technologist

On Thursday the 25th at approximately 20:42 a power failure with another server in the rack cause a breaker to trip, powering down my server. Initially the server seemed to come back fine, but errors were later spotted. These were due to a physical error on one of the hard drives where all of your websites are hosted, causing the disk array it is on to fail. At approximately 23:48pm the server was rebooted in an attempt to get the drives back on line, and again failed to recover fully.

My ISP were informed of the issued and worked through the night, but were unable to recover the hard drive arrangement. I started a recovery of the data from backup to a second disk array within the system with the aim of bringing up the core of the web sites in as short a time as possible - though the 146GB of data would have taken a long time to copy up!

In the meantime I also tried to recover data on the second local drive - the drive which had failed was one of a pair storing all website data in parallel, and the secondary drive was also failing to recover for unknown reasons.

At around 17:30 yesterday I managed to recover and get access tot the data on the spare hard drive which had failed, and proceeded to copy the data from that to a new pair of master disks. This was completed at 21:45 yesterday evening, and full service was restored. As far as I am aware no data was lost.

The system which went down was purely used for website hosting, and so none of your email was affected during the outage.

Posted by Dorian Moore in HostEverything on Saturday, Jun 27, 2009 at 12:34

Head To Toe is a site specific installation by Ross Phillips for Super Contemporary at The Design Museum, featuring a network of kiosks capturing video clips of eitehr head, body, and legs which are then sent to a pod at the Design Museum where they can be viewed in the style of the classic children's book, flipping through the videos to see each clip.

We're happy to have built much of the software for this installation, including the video processing infrastructure, data synchronisation, moderation and web and kiosk interactives. 

Visit the pods at the Design Museum, Selfridges, Covent Garden or Ideas Store and get yourself in on the action.

Posted by Dorian Moore in The Useful Arts Organisation on Wednesday, Jun 3, 2009 at 17:15

• 

  Blogs: Mad about Design - cover

• 

  Blogs: Mad about Design - dorian moore spread

I'm flattered to have this very website included in the new Page One / MaoMao book 'Blogs: Mad about Design', a collection of spreads from websites about design. I don't know quite how I made the mark to be included alongside some of my favourites such as Visual Complexity, City of Sound and information asthetics, but I did, and it's nice ot have this 9 year old site design recorded for posterity! It's a shame I sent them my snaps and links over a year ago or I'd have added the very deserving Creative Applications to my roster of reads.

I can't seem to find it for sale on-line yet, but when I do I'll update with a link.

Tags : book  books  design  features  print  website  work 
Posted by Dorian Moore on Wednesday, Jun 3, 2009 at 12:35

Completed earlier this year, but only just put live, is a new website for public works project Colchester Inn. This is the first stage of a project with First Site in Colchester, working with local communities to create works for the new First Site building.

The website is part blog, part mapping tool, part documentation of process, designed to show how the network of people involved in the projects grows and ideas are formed. To deal with this it switches from the standard blog format to something a bit more dynamic.

Whilst it uses horizontal navigation which is something I don't usually agree with - it goes against usability norms - here I am using it because it best represents a timeline, and more clearly delineates the entires. JavaScript is used to make the interface work more dynamically. 

With any luck this will turn into a more full mapping project in the future, with more cross linking and different visualisations of the underlying structures and relationships created throughout the process. 

Posted by Dorian Moore in The Useful Arts Organisation on Friday, May 22, 2009 at 23:00

dorian has completed another new website, this time for artist Rona Lee.

Posted by Dorian Moore in The Useful Arts Organisation on Monday, Feb 9, 2009 at 12:55

dorian has just finished a website for Scottish aritst Clare Yarrington.

Posted by Dorian Moore in The Useful Arts Organisation on Sunday, Feb 8, 2009 at 21:46

• 

I've started going through my record collection, listening to each record in order (1-n then alphabetically) was the original intent, but that got to 'Two Lone Swordsmen' - which in typing this I've only just realised should be filed under T not 2 - things started getting awfully repetitive, so now I'm leaping from artists to artists in this phase.

So far I've got to 50, and just listened to '50th Anniversary ov LSD - Tribute to Albert Hofmann' (released in 1993, and bought, I hasten to add - also, compilations are ordered by title, not in their own space, in my collection),next up is '50 years of Classic Horror Film Music (The Omen and Other Themes)'. Given the length of time my record collection was gathered over, and the various interests I've taken in different Genre's of music, this seemingly ordered approach is actually turning out to feel quite random.

Which is something I take great joy in: Chaos out of Order (especially when you try to beat mix them)

Posted by Dorian Moore on Saturday, Feb 7, 2009 at 20:37

• 

  'The Reader' by Guestroom

Last night I went to the launch of 'The Reader' by Guestroom, an artists edition book on the subject of Libraries, that is part of a greater body of work Guestroom are creating around collections, and libraries, including the Laswon Park Electronic Library that I've been asked to collaborate on. My first involvement in this is also my contribution to the book: an email of my initial thoughts on creating the library.

The book itself is beautiful fulfilling all of my book-as-fetish-object desires, from the lovingly screen printed cover designs that reflect my images of 'real' book covers, the patterns used inside it, the weight of the paper and the typesetting.It seems a crime to read it, to thumb through it and break the spine, to carry it with me to allow me ot absorb it and for it to be battered by that journey. But it is useful art to me, as well as beautiful art, and so it will be read, absorbed, and re-contextualised. It's use adding personal value to the object, whilst (perhaps) removing it from the art object.

The content is inspiring. From reading through the first couple of pages, and dipping into some random pages, it's made me consider ideas and directions, ways of using and presenting the Lawson Park Electronic Library that had previously been unformulated seeds, and are now blossoming in my mind. Let's hope we can do a fraction of them.

It's also nice seeing my email, in print. It made me re-appraise what I'd written, and think of it in a different context. It being the end of the book, but the start of the process of creating the library, was very poignant for me, spurring me on in my drive to make something unique, because of the feeling of something virtual becoming something real.

The reuse of my email, intended to introduce and start a process, full of typos, spelling mistakes, and wording I might not have used in a published piece is also nice. The permanence of it, the fact that I can not go back and edit it, might forever change the way I write emails, the way I compose myself. 

This is a task I'd already set of myself of late in the gathering of my output onto the web, which now has much more of a sense of permanence than it did when I started this website. The content of this database, my personal public library of thoughts, actions and events, is no longer in my control, it's indexed and aggregated and archived elsewhere, in servers I can only imagine the location of, owned by companies and people I will never meet, perhaps one day becoming the knowledge of a singularity I will never know.

So, perhaps, my words will come with more thought, with more meaning, and with more intent, than before. Or I will carry on as is. But I have been affected. Thank you Ruth & Maria.

• Review at ArtVehicle

Posted by Dorian Moore on Friday, Jan 16, 2009 at 09:35

Well, my theory of weird AIM chats with robots seems confiremd, this just in from AIM user PermissibleCoho, my previous encounter being with JapaneseCoho is enough consistency to post the id's without hesitation. It appears to be a variation of The Great Hatsby at play, who will hopefully be in touch again soon so I can opt-out.

Transcript (they are in bold)

Hey.
what?
hmmm, you are still a robot, aren't you?
hello?
Hello, yes, hello! Who are you?
i'm sorry, i have to study. please leave me alone.

Posted by Dorian Moore on Monday, Dec 15, 2008 at 14:10

• In Brooklyn After Dark - Religious Knives 20.1mb – m4a - deleted

Despite my dissapointment with "The Door", their latest release, I love the energy in this live track by Religious Knives from their Live @ Big Jar Books recording. It's not them at their freakout finest, but it's still got something to it which keeps me playing it again and again and again.

Tags : music  psych-rock  religious knives 
Posted by Dorian Moore on Tuesday, Nov 25, 2008 at 23:05