North Circular: Exploring Ulysses, Voyeurism, and Surveillance in an Interactive Soundscape

North Circular is a sonic environment and art installation that combines synthesized social media content with readings from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and interactive floor projections to encourage visitors to consider what the multilayered, hyperconnected, datafied city would look and sound like as constructed from our own data traces. Joyce’s painstakingly mapped central episode,‘The Wandering Rocks’, follows nineteen characters as they circulate the streets of Dublin, each lost in an interior monologue of thoughts and impressions. The episode presents an omniscient bird’s eye view of Dublin and a multiplicity of subjective views and sounds (ambient and spoken) of the city, creating an apt metaphor for the heavily surveilled and data rich 21st century metropolis. The characters in ‘The Wandering Rocks’ interact with each other as their paths cross—listening in and being overheard, observing and being observed—in the social fishbowl that was Dublin a century ago.