Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
It became obvious that mapping NAMA's property holdings was essential to
gain an understanding of the organisation, and the events which led to its creation,
in order to open it to scrutiny and critique. The
NAMAland
project, as originally
conceived, was to build on Hans Haacke's treatment of the entwinement of the
Shapolsky real estate holdings and New York City to create an AR portrait of
Dublin seen through the lens of NAMA properties. Through the specificity of such
an artistic treatment of the agency it would, I hoped, be possible to build a more
generalised critique of the financial bailout in all its complexity. A critique which
could demonstrate an approach for addressing the politics of austerity which were
sweeping Europe, and at that time concentrated in Ireland as one of the P.I.G.S.
6
countries.
To achieve these results it was first essential to research alternative sources of
data on NAMA and its property holding as all official channels were closed. I
identified an activist source of information on NAMA properties published on the
anonymous website
NAMA Wine Lake.
7
Maintained as a Google Doc, the NAMA-
bound spreadsheet was compiled from published sources of information connecting
property developers known to be in NAMA, their directorships of companies, and
properties controlled by these companies. Through a process of collating available
data sources and correlating them with known information on NAMA the unknown
author built a partial picture of the NAMA holdings from this public corporate
paper trail. Each entry was well documented with links to its original public
domain sources, important in a litigious climate, demonstrating the difficulties of
retroactively concealing data already in the public domain. Whilst one can only
speculate about the method employed to collate this data it is expected due to
its scale that it was produced from automatically data-mining newspaper records
and public records of company directorships. This data was, however, locationally
vague, street names were typically included with vague descriptors such as “site
on Mayor St” but lacked in sufficient detail to automatically geo-tag especially
with the precision required for an effective AR application. Building on the
NAMA
Wine Lake
research I enhanced this data by manually geo-tagging approximately
120 Dublin properties through visually identifying the sites in person and tagging
them with a handheld GPS unit. For legal reasons
8
the database had to be confined
to properties which could be located with a high degree of certainty for which
sufficient documentary evidence of their ownership could be provided. This data
was then used to create a geo-tagged mySQL database to be used as the data source
for
NAMAland
.
The application was first built in October 2010 and has been updated on a
regular basis since. It employs the
Layar
platform which provides a development
environment and software platform to create AR applications which run on the
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Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain the countries at the centre of the EU's financial crisis.
7
See namawinelake.wordpress.com
8
At the time it was unclear what the legal position on releasing this information was so I was
advised to refer to properties that were “reported to be in NAMA” rather than in NAMA.
