about town: allan's email 2000

article in cartography, the city, published by catalyst arts
distributed throughout belfast

Allan's Email 3 / 9 / 00
Allan got an email from a stranger recently. The mail was meant for another Alan elsewhere who wasthe stranger's cousin. We worked out that the woman sending the email lived in America. The detective work was a combination of her AOL address and the vernacular involved in describing meeting Rob Reiner the movie director from the film Cocoon

Well, Alan liked this film so much, so he wrote back to her saying that life was great and asking could he meet Rob Reiner. She replied shortly afterwards saying that it might be hard to arrange as he meets so many people that he might not remember her, but that she would do her best. The question is if the meeting was arranged would Reiner travel to Belfast to meet the recipient of someone else's email? Their correspondence continues.

'About Town' consists of a series of incidental stories from around Belfast gathered over the period of two months. These stories are used to attempt to map the city in a verenacular personalised way.

Belfast is a city frequently represented in the printed media but the representations of the city in newspapers are often restricted to familiar cliches of an unlivable place. This article takes the form of a map, acknoweledging it as an editorial document where select information is included or left out according to the maps function.