Camille, Andrew, Katrina et Compagnie (2008)

• Galerie d’art Louise et Reuben-Cohen de l’Université de Moncton, NB, 9 juillet – 31 août 2008

Camille, Andrew, Katrina et Compagnie
Projection vidéo – 120 minutes

CAMILLE, ANDREW, KATRINA ET COMPAGNIE est une projection vidéo d’une narration d’un scénario long métrage fiction en français. L’histoire est celle de Ted, un type jovial et plein d’entrain. Il est représentant d’assurances et demeure en Floride. Sa compagnie s’apprête à tenir une convention nationale. L’atmosphère est fébrile. Ted sait qu’un hommage lui sera rendu afin de souligner son volume de ventes. Il anticipe cette soirée avec beaucoup d’impatience. Le jour de l’arrivée des délégués en ville, Ted a la sensation que quelque chose de grave est sur le point de survenir Le moindre bruit l’inquiète. Il surréagit au moindre obstacle. Il est anxieux. Lors du souper d’ouverture offert aux délégués, il note que sur les portes noms des convives à sa table, Cindy, Dennis, Alex, Gil et Claudette sont tous des noms d’ouragans. Ted est convaincu qu’une grande catastrophe est sur le point de surgir mais est incapable de partager sa prémonition avec qui que ce soit.
Le projet contient 6 épisodes dont deux furent montrés à la Galerie Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen de L’Université de Moncton à Moncton au Nouveau Brunswick du 9 juillet au 31 août 2008.

Hurricane People – Le monde ouragan (2008)

• Galerie d’art Louise et Reuben-Cohen de l’Université de Moncton, NB, 9 juillet – 31 août 2008

ELIPSON (image above) – 36″ X 24″ inkjet
BETA -36″ X 24″ inkjet -jet d’encre
FRANCES – 36″ X 24″ inkjet -jet d’encre

This is art VS This is not art (2008)

8:44 am
The cold is intense.  My walk to the College is like an expedition.  My head is in there, somewhere under the layers.  As I breathe frost is forming on my scarf and face.  I feel the cold creeping into my fingers and back.  It is starting to get in through my boots.  Under my hood, all I hear is the resonating squeak of my footsteps like a walk in Styrofoam moon boots.  It hurts.

8:49
The SAIT campus is already bustling with people.  We look like steam engines, puffing white clouds of life that freeze in mid air.  I think it’s minus 40C.
Choo! Choo!

8:52
Horror!  I spot a conductor/student walking leisurely.  His steam is thick like molasses.  He isn’t even wearing a tuque.  He has a jacket with a hood but he is not covering his head!  His face is calm.  The man appears to be immune to pain.  I am thinking, he looks like me in July…

8:53
As I continue, I think that the man must have lost his power of thought.  Then, it strikes me that I am witnessing a performance, an art performance.  As Laurie Anderson once played violin while her standing with her ice skates frozen into a block of ice, I interpret that this man was doing something amazing.  I just didn’t realize it at the exact moment.

8:57
I arrive – I have made it!  I am finally at ACAD.  The warmth of the mall hits me like a wall of bliss.  Others have arrived at the same time; all look stunned by the brutality of the cold.  We move slowly while our clothing regains some sort of flexibility. The mall is filled with the wonderful works of the First Year Studies Exhibition.  Near the elevators, there are a few men kneeling down beside their buckets of cement.  They are busy repairing broken tiles and have set up a barricade with yellow tape.

9:36
On my way to the Faculty lounge I notice that the monitor of the Diversity booth, which sits in the middle of the Mall, is sporting a black label stuck in the middle of the screen.  The label has been made with an old label maker and the white letters state: THIS IS NOT ART.  I gaze around the mall before reading the label again.  My first thought is that the label points conceptually to surrealist René Magritte’s painting, The Treachery Of Images*.  This is after all, an Art school, throbbing with ideas.  Satisfied, I continue to the Faculty Lounge.  Then…

9:49
I have this weird feeling that maybe the statement on that label was not so layered, not so complex.  Maybe someone, here in the innards of this laboratory, needs to have things labelled according to the TELL ME WHAT IS THIS book.

10:31
Time flies.  My Sound I class is finishing the set up for a laptop performance in the arthole.  Things are going well in the placement of two tables, a P.A. system, and with an orderly jungle of cables and adaptors, 8 laptops have been wired up and are ready to go.  Tim from the AV has been helping us.  The idea for our performance is to sample sounds with a microphone and create real time loops with the material.  As there are 8 loops created at any moment it becomes clear that this is as much a sonic experimentation as an exercise in listening.

11:12
We have been creating texture and rhythm for 30 minutes now.  Some of the results are curious, some are engaging, and some make for difficult listening.

11:13
The group has developed a minimal soundscape, almost inaudible, which makes the ghetto blaster of the café overpowering.  After a while I decide to ask the café staff to lower its music.  The person I ask looks at me without speaking.  Without words, the message to me is of the unhappiness of being forced to listen to sound art.  The unspoken words might be that the sound experiment is cutting into the musical dreamscape.  I thank him for lowering the sound of the ghetto blaster.

11:14
On my way back to the laptop area, I realize how bizarre this non-comment is.  I mean this is an Art school.  This is a ‘laboratory environment that is committed to unconstrained inquiry’.  I begin to wonder many students, here at school, boast a dislike for abstract painting over landscape painting, or for curved shapes over square angles, or for lights that are not of the hue prescribed in the TELL ME WHAT IS THIS SO I CAN MAKE SENSE OF IT book.  If there is aesthetic intolerance here, one can only imagine how dangerous it is outside of the lab.

11:40
The performance is over.  We have taken all of the equipment down.  On our way back to the fourth floor I notice that the workers who were repairing the broken tiles are gone.  They have left warnings on the barricade.  The warnings state: DO NOT TOUCH.  THIS IS NOT AN ARTWORK.

11:40:02
YIKES!  Is this another Treachery Of Images or is it just the steam from our mouths making it difficult to see?  It is not yet midday and the opportunity to generate dialogue has raised its head three times.

Daniel Dugas

* The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images 1928-29) is a painting by Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte, famous for its inscription Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

NB – All of these events took place, not exactly at the times stated here.

Même un détour serait correct (2008)

Une critique de Même un détour serait correct par Antonio D’Alfonso qui a paru dans la revue Liaison, n° 138, hiver 2007-2008, p. 54.

PLUS QUE LA COUVERTURE (l’habit), ce sont les épigraphes qui aident à mieux comprendre un livre. Ces installations métaphoriques agissent, telles des signalisations routières. On le sait, un recueil de poésie n’a pas besoin de ce genre d’indicateur de sens. Heureusement, un vers est le moins linéaire des phrases, ce pont qui permet à notre imagination de vaguer à travers tous les sens. Disons simplement que, de temps en temps, le poète cherche, en citant un autre écrivain, à limiter les divagations chez le lecteur. Un clin d’œil.

Daniel Dugas de l’Acadie utilise trois épigraphes: un de Charles Bukowski, un autre de Léo Ferré et le dernier d’Herbert Read. Au fur et à mesure que nous avançons dans notre lecture, chacun révèle l’engagement politique de l’auteur, qui pointe clairement dans une certaine direction. Me voici, semble-t-il dire.

Le premier poème du livre s’ouvre sur « des monstres », et le dernier se termine avec « de la faible lueur au bout des tunnels ». Ce n’est pas un hasard si Dugas clôt le premier poème sur les monstres avec le vers « des fils d’Ariane » et cite à la fin son recueil de tunnels. Même un détour serait correct est un livre sur le sens que prennent les choses, plus que leur signification leur direction, ou plus exactement, la non-signification des choses qui reviennent au point de départ. On détale dans ce dédale de la « noirceur » avec l’espoir de se trouver là où « la plus petite lueur/est encore la chose la plus brillante de l’Univers ».

Ce n’est non plus un hasard si Dugas cherche à donner du sens à ce qui semble abstrait. Il se réfère au mathématicien suisse Leonhard Euler et s’amuse avec son idée des sept ponts de Königsberg pour écrire une forte et brillante section poétique, « Le problème du pont de Königsberg ». Comment traverser ce monde sans jamais utiliser le même pont deux fois de suite? C’est malheureusement impossible. Euler l’a démontré́ dans le dix- huitième siècle. Dugas semble croire que oui, tout est possible.

Si cela est vrai, contentons- nous des détours, allons dans le sens contraire du raccourci. Allons par le plus long chemin. Dugas propose une solution bien originale à ce problème mathématique de la répétition : «l’histoire des ponts/c’est l’histoire des désirs d’aller de l’autre coté́/d’aller vers l’autre». L’autre voie, c’est «le pont qui bouge pendant que l’eau reste immobile ».

J’aime quand un poème me faire rêver à l’Ailleurs et, chez Daniel Dugas, l’Ailleurs, c’est toujours la réalité́. Aucune immobilité́, aucune stagnation: les titres des poèmes sont des verbes à l’infinitif (sauf trois, les substantifs utilisés dans le premier vers de chaque section) présentes tous en ordre alphabétique (comme des ordres ?). Le recueil se divise en trois sections : « L’effondrement de l’architecture », « Le problème du pont de Königsberg» et «Porte-Bonheur», où les poèmes y sont disposés dans une mise en page singulière: dans la première section, ils sont alignés à la gauche de la marge ; dans la deuxième, ils sont centrés, et dans la dernière, Daniel Dugas les aligne à la marge de droite. Indice d’une trinité́ du bonheur? Possible. Parfaitement, maïeutiquement, «une oasis pour les assoiffés… les affamées… les blessés…».

Daniel Dugas, Même un détour serait correct, poésie, les Éditions Prise de parole, Sudbury, 2006, 86 pages.

 http://www.erudit.org/culture/liaison1076624/liaison1080654/40651ac.pdf

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

Le Monde merveilleux de Corinne et Valbert (2007)

Vidéo réalisée pour le 50e anniversaire de Corinne et Valbert – le 18 août 2007

As a results of bogus copyright infringments warning I decided to delete all my videos from Youtube – Dec 2012

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.