Announcing 2014 AIRIE Fellows

Valerie LeBlanc and myself are extremely happy to have been invited by the Everglades and Dry Tortugas National Park to be the artists in residence for July 2014.  It is a prestigious opportunity and referring to the tradition of invited artists, as stated in the 1st paragraph of the letter, ‘our work there will become part of the permanent record of the parks that helps to preserve them’.  Described as a subtropical wilderness, with a unique combination of temperate and tropical characteristics, the Everglades has been designated as a World Heritage Site, an International Biosphere reserve, and a Wetland of International Importance.  One of the main outcomes that the Park hopes to gain from the visiting artists is ‘to help visitors make emotional and intellectual connections with this amazing place’.  As per our practice(s), we are looking forward to continuing to create poetic storylines within the exploration of this new media locative soundwalk project.

Artists in Residence in Everglades proudly announces the 2014 AIRIE Fellows. This year, AIRIE boasts a creative group of local, national and international artists across several disciplines including painters, installation artists, new media artists, photographers, and writers, who will live and work in the Everglades for a month at a time.

2014 AIRIE Fellows include photographers Adam Nadel and Dana Levy, poet Breanna Dixon, painter Rodney Dickson, video artists Karl Staven and duo Daniel Dugas & Valerie LeBlanc, as well as Florida natives including multi-disciplinary artist Elite Kedan, photographer Emily Myerscough, visual artist Reed Van Brunschot, Regina Jestrow and Prudence Gill and writer Nathaniel Sandler. Read more about each of the AIRIE 2014 fellows.

South Florida is home to the only subtropical wilderness area in the country, AIRIE is the only program bringing artists to the Everglades. AIRIE’s purpose is to inform, connect, and support artists, writers and musicians who wish to be inspired by the Everglades and then become ambassadors for the Park and its resources. AIRIE partners with Everglades National Park staff to offer month-long artist residencies in the Park’s subtropical wilderness. At least twelve AIRIE Fellows per year live and create new work in the Park, and in return lead interactive activities with visitors and donate artwork to the Park.

With generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Arts Challenge Grant, AIRIE connects Fellows with the South Florida cultural community to bring attention to this unique and endangered part of our national heritage. AIRIE’s expanded programming will feature a year-round calendar of events both in the Everglades and outside the Park, including readings, performances, workshops and lectures. Through these outreach events, Fellows will use their art forms to engage the public, showcasing the Everglades as inspiring, important and worth protecting.

AIRIE Fellows have the unique opportunity to get to know the ecology of the Everglades by being immersed in it, and then share their perspective through creative public programs. “In a park known for its spectacular and diverse wildlife, the art and voices of AIRIE artists reveal other unique, and often missed, dimensions of this special place,” remarks Park Superintendent Dan Kimball.

from: http://airie.org/2013/announcing-2014-airie-fellow/

talk mainstream (2009-2010)

talk mainstream is a Twitter Transitivity* project by Daniel Dugas exploring how language and spam works in the construction of knowledge. An Apple script downloads the Google Trends list information and a MAX patch, is set up to manufacture the tweets. Ironic comments rise out of the list of keywords people are searching as compiled by Google, and other lists of verbs, nouns, prepositions, adverbs and locales.

*Transitivity is a way of describing the relationship between participants and processes in the construction of clauses – basically, ‘who (or what) does what to whom (or what)’.
John Hartley (2002) Communication, Cultural and Media Studies – The Key Concepts, London, Routledge

The project ran from November 9 until December 15, 2009.

Tweeter account

 – Twitter archive

Are you ready? (2008)

ARE YOU READY?

David McCallum  is a musician and a media artist from Toronto.  His day job is editor of Musicworks Magazine, his passion is to discover new terrains.  With a background in physics, music composition and new media, he is one of the new breed of explorers that bring science and art together.  McCallum has a diverse body of work that encompasses music, performance, locative media, video, net art and installation.  The motivation behind all of these works is an insatiable curiosity, a desire to experiment and to share his discoveries with diverse audiences.

LOCATIVE ARTS
In the last few years, we have seen numerous projects rooted in geometry, location and psychogeography.  Projects with names like Geograffiti, Sound Mapping, Urban Tapestries, and GPS Drawings.  All of these are locative art, meaning that they use location-based media such GPS or Wi-Fi as the medium.  WARBIKE, one of McCallum’s most important works to date, is such a project.  It is a bicycle with a clear plastic container attached at the front, loaded with electronics that sonify computer wireless networks.   As the bicycle rider cycles around town, the electronics pick up nearby Wi-Fi signals and turn them into squeaking sounds based on the strength of the signals and the encryption status of the network.  There are two types of wireless networks, those that are encrypted and those that are not.  If the initial motivation of McCallum was to draw attention to the level of safety of any network, the most important effect of his project is to make the participants aware of this invisible layer of communications that is floating in our public spaces.  Those invisible networks of information are now ubiquitous in our urbanscapes.  McCallum points out:

“Did you know that almost anywhere that you go in a city you’ll be sharing space with someone’s private wireless computer network?  All of their personal communication—e-mail, love messages, bank passwords, credit card numbers, and bizarre surfing habits—will be passing through your body without your awareness. Who are they, and how do you feel about sharing space with their personal life?”

The image of emails and love messages and even passwords and bank accounts passing through bodies has an undeniable poetic weight but it also raises important questions about privacy and free access to information.  One of the big questions is how can an Open Society be built around private networks?  This concern is also McCallum’s, as a volunteer for wireless Toronto, a not-for-profit group promoting no-fee wireless Internet access.

Popular geotagging software like Google Earth has help fuelled a passion for anything location. Locative arts projects are sprouting everywhere and McCallum continues to question and to negotiate their relevance and problematic.   Can we compare the WARBIKE rider, seeing and feeling what is around, to the fox in the Little Prince?  Is the rider seeing the invisible?  Is the essential located only in the hip downtown core, in the Hotspots of our cities?  Can this abundance of information that is surrounding and enveloping us all the time keep us warm at night?   In a recent email exchange McCallum stated:

“I’m no longer explicitly interested in pursuing purely psychogeographic things. I’d like to focus more on the experience of people within spaces, be they urban or not… There’s also been a bit of a fall out, at least in Toronto, with the psychogeographic community. Those who were only casually interested, like me, are starting to realize that to truly understand the workings of the city, one must look beyond the hip downtown core and into the rather unhip and desolate suburbs. I’m not sure that this is anything that any of the core psychogeographic boosters are terribly interested in, or are even equipped to handle. This isn’t even taking into account the drudgery of city planning where the reality involves budgets and garbage pail infrastructure and other incredibly tedious but necessary components to a city. And then there’s also the slightly cultish nature of public space boosterism, or the class division between those who have the luxury to spend time worrying about public space and those who do not.”

When in 1897, Guglielmo Marconi sent the first wireless communication message over water, he could never have imagined the complexities of our encrypted digital age.  The message, sent from Lavernock Point, South Wales to Flat Holm Island, a distance of 14 kilometres, was simply “Are you ready”.  110 years later, it looks like this message is still resonating through space.  Are we ready?

PD & Do-it-Yourself attitude
David McCallum is coming to Calgary to give a workshop on PD , which he uses for music. PD, aka Pure Data, is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing.  Miller Puckette developed the program in the 1990s for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works.  One of the great advantages of Pd over Max Msp, a similar program, which also originated from Puckette, is that Pd is a freeware.

McCallum is an advocate of the open source movement and of the do-it-yourself attitude.  He does have strong convictions about the craft of new media art and the importance of doing the work by himself or with his collaborators.  David sometimes works with the i/o media group, a collective of media artists exploring real-time improvisation performance .  He also is capable of looking at technological apparatus and using it in novel ways.  His performance i swallow  is a good example. The MacBook’s design has the mic and webcam directly beside each other.  McCallum can play the feedback through the microphone while the webcam captures his actions.  This dual process allows the audience to see a connection between the sound and his actions—something, McCallum says is lacking in most electronic music performance.

David will be at EMMEDIA Friday, January 11, 2008 – 7:00 PM to present his project WARBIKE.  He will also be giving a Pure Data Introductory Workshop January 12-13, 2007, Noon – 5:00PM.
For more information call 263.2833

1. David McCallum websites includes:

http://www.mentalfloss.ca/sintheta/projects/?

http://sintheta.blogware.com/

2. On a technical level, the ‘sniffing’ is done by Kismet, a wireless network detector, the audio by Pure Data, and Python is acting as an interpreter between two.
3. David was the editor of the Locative Technologies issue (March 2007), digital arts quarterly magazine, vague terrain.  For more info:http://www.vagueterrain.net/content/archives/journal06/journal06.html
4. Pure Data: http://puredata.info/
5. http://www.mantissa.ca/iomedia/
6. i swallow was presented earlier this year at the Pleasure Dome’s New Toronto Works Show and at Interaccess both in Toronto.
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOknyZ7QHM0

Text published at EMMEDIA Gallery & Production Cociety

This fall Daniel Dugas has been touring his real time network performance Free Market Karaoke in Mexico City and on the East coast.  He was also invited to the Trois-Rivieres Poetry Festival where he read from his latest book ‘Même un detour serait correct’.  Daniel works and lives in Calgary.

(FMK) Karaoke du marché libre (2007)

Free Market Karaoke (2005-2009) from Daniel H. Dugas on Vimeo.

• Subterfuge – Galerie Sans Nom, Moncton, NB, 30 novembre 2007

Paysage sonore crée lors d’une performance à la Galerie Sans Nom, Moncton, Nouveau Brunswick dans le cadre de l’exposition de groupe célébrant le 30 e anniversaire de la GSN. La pièce a été crée avec de l’information des marchés à termes (futures market)

Teleo – 10 amp relay (2007)

(FMK), Karaoke de Mercado Libre (2007)

• IM_POLIS – TRANSITIO_MX Festival, Ciudad de Mexico, Sabado 13 2007

Performance sonoro

El Karaoke de Mercado Libre es una series de entornos sonoros e interactivos creados en tiempo real por medio de una computudora y un programa específico que permite generarlos, basándose en los datos financieros de las compañias que están negociando en la bolsa de valores.

Interactive soundscape created during the Transitio_MX Festival at the Laboratorio Arte-Alameda, in Mexico City – oct.12.07

TMX- Telephonos de Mexico

ANC – Angus Coote Holding

FIB BID (2007)

• Paved Arts, Saskatoon, SK, February 23 – March 10 2007

BID is the symbol for Sotheby’s, the noted auction house on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). A FIB is a trivial lie.

This interactive video projection is based on a short clip from the movie THE JUROR, a 1996 film directed by Brian Gibson. Demi Moore stars as Annie Laird, a single mother, picked for jury duty on a Mafia trial. She is forced to persuade her fellow jurors to vote “not guilty” by the “Teacher” who threatens to kill her son. When the trial is over, it seems that he cannot let her go. (1) Annie is a sculptor who makes boxes reminiscent of the FLUXKITS.(2) The content holds meaning to the artist and can be interacted with by the audience. The Teacher played by ALEC BALDWIN befriends ANNIE through buying a few of her works on exhibit in a New York gallery. Here is the transcript of their first encounter:

THE TEACHER
Do you know Japan?

ANNIE
uh huh

THE TEACHER
Contemporary Art is a sort of currency there now, because its value is so inconstant, it’s so attractively pliant.

ANNIE
…I’m lost… I’m not connecting the dots here

THE TEACHER
None of that really matters, all that matters is we need to start getting your pieces traded… record some six figure sales… get you the right review in Art Forum, the proper niche at the Basel Art Fair, that sort of thing, but that’s my job don’t you worry about that.

ANNIE
Listen, Mister Cordell

THE TEACHER
Call me Mark

ANNIE
OK Mark. Listen…

THE TEACHER
May I call you Annie?

ANNIE
…Yeah, you know you can call me whatever the hell you want – but I am not interested in having my art used as some kind of currency!

THE TEACHER
Annie… what do you think I get out of this… do you think I make money out of this… I don’t, I don’t need to… what I do for a living pays me very, very well. I do this so that artists like you can go into you studio and work on your boxes and not worry whether of not your children are being fed… so that these idiots that control the art….

Intent
“I do not want my art used as a currency “ is the key phrase. When I first saw the movie I was laughing out loud, I could not believe that an artist would say that. How funny can we be? What kind of sordid joke is this? I have to say that when I looked at the movie again I was still laughing. But what does it mean? Is it like a mechanic that says, “No, no, no I cannot accept any payment for changing the cylinder head gasket on your car,” or a real estate agent that says, “Please do not insult me by wanting to give me money in exchange for selling your house,” etc. Obviously this is nonsense, but when it comes to art, or at least in the media version of the artist, it is acceptable, it is plausible: artists are unpractical and eccentric. This clip incited me to look at the art market, which is a business like any other. Art, like chemicals and pork bellies, is subject to the pressure of the market. If Annie Laird refuses to sell then maybe it will make her art less available, more desirable, and therefore, increase the value of her work. But then again, she could vanish into oblivion. She could also choose to flood the market with her boxes à la mode de Wal-Mart, but that is another story. I choose the Sotheby’s Art House because it is the oldest international auction house and because it is listed on the NYSE, unlike Christie’s, which is a private company. I was interested in using some of the information that is relayed in real time – minus 20 minutes – on the Internet; like the highest price of a share, the lowest price of a share, the volume of sale, the difference between the highs and the lows, etc. I have been following the stock market for some time, using the data to create soundscapes as in the Free Market Karaoke project (2005), or to alter projections like in the do_wild_loops; do_wild_jumps; [big ceo’s talking to small bugs] installation (2003). I am interested in the visualization of data, in the graphical presentation of information but also in the re-contextualization of information. In the do_wild_loops project, I saw the DOW CHEMICAL CO stock rise sharply when the Iraq war started in 2003. Because of this dramatic change I had to review and reset the range in which the incoming information would evolve.

Daniel Dugas
Calgary, AB
February 2007

fibid is portmanteau word fusing FIB and BID together. It is a currency created especially for the exhibition. For this Saskatoon exhibition, the ‘bank’ has issued series of 180 – ’10 fibids’, 200 – ’20 fibids’ and 191 – ‘5 fibids’.

All fibids are numbered. I intend to distribute these bills during the opening on Friday, February 23rd.Ten bills have been marked with a special number and will win a prize of either a CD of FMK or a DVD of La Dauphine.

FMK (2005-2007)

• Transitio Festival, Mexico City, MX, 2007
• Galerie Sans Nom, Subterfuge, Moncton, NB, 2007
• Mayworks Festival, Calgary, AB – May 1, 2005
• Sound Bites, NSCAD + Centre for Art Tapes, Halifax, NS – July 15, 2005
• Faucet Media Arts Centre, Sackville, NB – July 17, 2005

Free Market Karaoke (FMK), is both a series of real-time interactive soundscapes and a computer program. The program allows me to create real-time interactive soundscapes based upon the financial data of companies trading on the Dow Jones Index. Companies generate wealth for their shareholders and an abundant flow of data. This information is continually streaming out in real-time (minus a 15 minute delay) from the World Stock exchanges and is displayed on various web sites on the Internet. Investors and brokers are in this game to make a buck, to make their investments grow as much as they can; the bigger the better as the saying goes. They do not usually orchestrate their movements with one another to create sense on a language level. The money is the meaning of their entreprise, the only pattern worth wearing, the reason to exist. My role in FMK is mainly that of a remixer. My decisions are directed in the reorganization of incoming data into musical events. I am on the lookout – ‘the ear-out’ – for rhythms, textures, ups and downs, anything that seems to be talking. I want the digits to sing and dance, to laugh and to cry. I want to see life-savings sounds roll in and out like a fog bank that envelops a small coastal town. I want to hear the investors’ roar like the turbines of a space shuttle racing through the earth’s atmosphere upon re-entry. I want to transform big time brokers into bees flying in a field of brightly colours flowers, into dust trapped inside the vacuum of a Dirt Devil, into oil seeping out of the ground, into the wind blowing inside a cave, into the electricity singing through wires.
These soundscapes were created with the software Max/MSP in conjunction with Charles Hines’ QuoteFiler 1.31. I used the output data from: YAHOO CURRENT QUOTE VARIABLES, the Last Trade Price, the Day High, the % Change of a share and so on, to manipulate audio signal and MIDI information.

iTunes

How many luxury cars in your town? (2004)

Luxury cars are a symbol of success and achievement, a measure of power and glory, the object by which one’s place in the world is defined and qualified. Impeccable mechanic, refinement of the interior, leather seats, the full array of safety equipment; whether it is called Brake Assist, Electronic Stability Program (ESP), or Automatic Slip Control. (ASR) The GPS receiver on GM’s ONSTAR system is another example of a feature that discerning consumers might expect to find in a ‘top of the line’ vehicle.

How many luxury cars in your town? analyses the traffic on highways and in one projection, merges fragments of vehicles, with lines from the Book One* of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This project looks at the symbolic of cars as an anthropomorphic fantasy of individualism.

The How many luxury cars in your town? is also a video series project in which a ‘looker’ literally names the luxurious cars that passes on a street.

*Book one – Of the causes of improvement in the productive powers of labour, and of the order according to which its produce is naturally distributed among the different ranks of the people.

Note: For a complete online version of An Inquiry into the Causes of the Wealth of Nation see the website of The Adam Smith Institute

http://www.adamsmith.org/smith/won-intro.htm

do_wild_loops; do_wild_jumps; [big ceo’s talking to small bugs] (2003)

• EMMEDIA, Calgary, Alberta, March 23 -29, 2003
• New Media Research Networks Conference, Charlottetown PEI, March 26-27, 2004
• Ed Video Media Arts Centre , Guelph, ON July 9-23, 2004

do_wild_loops; do_wild_jumps; [big ceo’s talking to small bugs] (2003) from daniel dugas on Vimeo.

related interactive projects: here

Project realized through the A.I.R. program at EMMEDIA in 2003.

In the spring of 2002, scientists were forecasting a severe infestation of grasshopper for Central Alberta. I became interested in seeing how the farmers were going to deal with the situation. The most common solution, insecticide is also the most hard core. Chlorpyrifos, trade name Dursban, Lorsban and others, is primarily produced by the US multinational DOW Agro a subsidiary of the Dow Chemical Company and is used widely throughout the world. Chlorpyrifos, one of about 100 organophosphate insecticides on the market today, is a neurotoxin used to kill insect pests by disrupting their nervous system. The organophosphates were developed during World War Two by Nazi chemists. [1]

According to Dow, Chlorpyrifos, is one of the great success stories in pest control. [2] As The Dow Chemical Company is the main player, I started to look at the company itself; its products, triple bottom-line, history; and the most crucial element of all, its trading values. Dow is known for all sorts of chemistry successes; like the first commercial scale production of bleach in 1898, the production of silicones for the military in the 40’s, the introduction of the revolutionary Ziploc bag (1968), the marketing of the first compact discs (1983), and so on. In 1960, Dow introduced 23 new products. One of them; Agent Orange, would generate enormous profits for the company.

In the 1990’s, Dow Chemical was involved in the silicone breast implants controversy. The Company dodged lawsuits by proving “ … that it only owned half of the breast implant manufacturer Dow Corning Corporation and that they did not develop, test or manufacture silicone breast implants. … ”[3]

In 1999, Dow and the infamous Union Carbide Corporation merged to become the 2nd largest chemical company in the world. Union Carbide Corporation owned and operated the pesticide factory, which caused the worst chemical accident in history. Located in Bhopal, India, over 40 tons of highly poisonous methyl isocyanate gas leaked out of the plant at midnight on December 2, 1984. More than 8,000 people died in the immediate aftermath of what is known as the ‘Chemical Hiroshima’. 10 more are dying every month due to exposure-related diseases. At present, Dow is divesting itself of any moral and financial responsibility related to this tragedy. [4]

May the force be with you
Through my research, I learned that one of the basic ways to curb the grasshopper population is to clean the ditches alongside of the roads, and to turn over the soil in the fields. The process uproots and exposes grasshopper eggs, to greatly reduce infestations. These solutions might be viewed as rather sissy compared to the product solutions proposed by the industry: Lorsban 4E, Warrior T, Capture 2EC, etc.

Some of those products, and especially the Genetically Modified Organisms are re-writing ecology FAST FORWARD. The desire to master the world has never been so tempting, while the power to resist such changes remains limited at best. A quote by Dr. Denis Waitley, Productivity Consultant for Monsanto, one of Dow’s largest competitors, sums up the situation in a very sanitized manner, “There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept responsibility for changing them.” [5]

I became interested in the interaction and the power relation between the “head” and the “tail”, the CEO’s and the bugs, decision makers and individuals. Dow has a Leadership web page with a thumbnail photo and a biographic description for each of its executives. I have copied and pasted everybody who’s somebody and I gave them a big cushy leather executive chair right in the middle of my project. For several years, the focus of my work has been related to the economy. Boom and bust alike. One economic tool that I have followed with regularity is the Map of the Market, [6] which provides a colour coded map of current market values. This visual aid was inspirational for the do_wild_loops’ project.

Working with the Cycling74 MAX/MSP and the Jitter programs, I set up a series of mechanisms to download financial information from The Dow Company (the latest price of a share, the percentage change and the dollar change of a share), setting up a custom “map of the market.” I use this information to affect and inflict changes on the selected movies, images and sound files inside the program. I created a structure where the visitors could re-write, if not history, at least the biographies of the Leaders. Visitors to the exhibition can select and erase a biography, write a new one and upload it onto the server hosting where the project’s website.

1 -Organophosphate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organophosphate

2 – Chlorpyrifos helps: http://www.dowagro.com/chlorp/about/over.htm

3 – Breast-Implant Verdict Reversed by Appeals Court: http://www.dow.com/dow_news/corporate/2002/20021209a.htm

4 – For more on information see audio file doww19.aif

– For more information on Bhopal: http://www.bhopal.net/index.php

5 – Monsanto Products Overview: http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto/layout/products/default.asp

6 – SmartMoney.com: Map of the Market :http://www.smartmoney.com/marketmap/

7- Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth Vol. 2. No. 12. Dec 1973. Published by National Periodical Publications Inc. N.Y. N.Y.

(revised May 29, 2017)