Sep 18, 2005
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EMMAX (2003-2006)

Emmax was created on September 2003, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada under the umbrella & support of EMMEDIA.  Emmax is a club / group / community of people who are interested in working / playing / learning and sharing ideas and exploring with Cycling74 MAX MSP and Jitter software

Founding members: Ken Buera, Daniel Dugas, Jim Goertz, David Kim, Valerie LeBlanc and Don Simmons.

EMMEDIA Gallery & Production Society gratefully acknowledges the invaluable support of The Canada Council for the Arts, The Calgary Community Lottery Board, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, The Calgary Region Arts Foundation, The National Film Board of Canada, Webcore Labs, The Alberta Media Arts A lliance Society, our many dedicated members, artist-producers, volunteers and the Calgary community.
last update: jan 2006

 

Caroling with Emmax – Dec 23, 2003
Participants: Ken Buera, Daniel Dugas, Jim Goertz, Don Simmons

Ledgefest festivalof ambient music: Jan 9 – 12, 2004
Participants:  Ken Buera, Daniel Dugas, Jim Goertz, Don Simmons

Birthday song – The New Gallery, Jan 17, 2004
Participants:  Ken Buera, Don Simmons

Not White Noise – Bubonix Tourist & Birds and Stone, Dec 19, 2004
Participants:  Ken Buera, Kay Burns, Daniel Dugas, Jim Goertz, Valerie LeBlanc, Don Simmons

Silencing Critical Art, Jan 20, 2005
Participants:  Ken Buera, Don Simmons

Localective, Jan 23, 2006
Participants: Tyler Johnson, Dallin Ursenbach, Anthony Gasca, Tammy Kahn, Brendan Baudat, Amanda Henderson, Sarah Houle-Lowry, Bogdan Cheta, Jena Walker, Maria Cucueto, Robert Harpin

 

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May 8, 2005
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MUDSC (2005)

Screenings:
• 19es Instants Vidéo, Marseille, FR, 2006
• Rencontre du film numérique de Mantes La Jolie- Centre Culturel Le Chaplin, FR, 2006
• Vidéotèque éphémère, VIDEOFORMES, Clermont-Ferrand, FR, 2006
• Comox Valley Art Gallery, Courtenay, BC, 2005

Même un détour serait correct – MUDSC -est une dérive dans les nouvelles villes encloisonnées, dans les villes forteresses, les villes-privées, où la peur de l’autre est portée à l’extrême et où les caméras de surveillance, les portails télécommandés et les gardiens de sécurité sont devenus les nouvelles nécessités de cette vie à l’abri de la vie elle-même.

Dans cette topographie du conflit, il y a aussi l’espoir de trouver un terrain neutre pour construire ou reconstruire un espace habitable.
Même un détour serait correct : 32 minutes
Français avec sous-titres anglais

MUDSC: Même un détour serait correct – translated: ‘Even a detour would be all right’ is a poetic expedition into; urban sprawl, gated communities, those private cities of our new world where the fear of the others is pushed to the extreme. Those are the places where surveillance cameras, remote controlled doors and security guards have become the new necessities of this life sheltered from life itself.In this topography of conflict there is also the hope to find a neutral ground to build or to rebuild a liveable space.
MUDSC contains 18 videos poems.
Même un détour serait correct : 32 minutes
French with English subtitles

 

MUDSC sur YouTube :

cribler

couper

tomber

le traffic

le point de fuite

suffire

précipiter

réchauffer version canola

réchauffer version condo

la fin du monde

couvrir

envelopper

disparaître

les bungalows

la banlieue

baissez-nous

animer

May 7, 2005
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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.

fmk-img-tracks

 

 

iTunes

 

May 6, 2005
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Le siege de leur esprit – The place of their spirit (2005)

Le siège de leur esprit – The Place of their Spirit (2003) from daniel dugas on Vimeo.

• Alberta Scene Albertaine / Media Arts, Ottawa, ON, 2005

Le siege de leur esprit – The place of their spirit, is a poetic assessment of the power imbalance woven into the fabric of culture.

Oct 13, 2004
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An Artist Statement (2004)

An Artist Statement by Daniel Dugas

from a lecture at the University of Lethbridge – October 2004 / updated in February 2008

So what is it that I do?
What excites me?
What makes me angry?
What makes me tick and go on as an artist?
I am interested in everything but maybe the word everything is too big.
In 1990, I was finishing a residency at the Banff Center and I thought that maybe I could find some work and stay in the area.
I went downtown to a construction site. I made sure that I was wearing my steel-toed boots. I asked to speak with the foreman.
He came walking over, and I remember that he did not look too happy that day,
or maybe he was just a crabby kind of guy.
Anyway he said: “What do you want”?
I answered, “I am looking for work.”
He asked me what I could do, and I said, “Everything”.
He looked at me in Total Disgust and said: “Nobody can do everything, ” and he walked away.
I was left standing in this huge hole of mud, kind of stunned.
Maybe instead of saying ‘everything,’ I could have said ‘many things,’ and I could have added that I like to learn.

The thing is that I am interested in many things.
I am interested in construction,
how things are built,
how people work together to put something up.
I am curious about TAYLORISM: The Principles of Scientific Management.
I am interested in knowing why the foreman looked so angry when he said that nobody does everything.
And, as I don’t know what building they were constructing, I am still curious to know if they put brick or stucco on the façade.
I am also interested in poetry
In the idea of going on a sailboat
In insects – and especially the ants
In patterns on wallpaper In barcodes

In extended memory
In Martha Stewart and bad financial advice
In woodworking and the history of glue
In walking long enough to forget where I am going

In TCP IP DV NTSC ASCII HTML GPS XML URL
In Black Boxes which are really orange
In Time to Live
In Smileys:
Ta Ta For Now
Smile Smile with a large nose
Laughing hard
Screaming
Drooling
Ill with the flu

I am interested in Open source codes and distribution
In wikis In people having a chance to write
In blogs
The story of our world
In inventing meanings

I am interested in cryptography
In the Morse code
In algorithms of all sorts
In the frequency of letters in texts
In the absence of the letter E in the novel A Void

I am interested in loops
In dead ends
In spam
In people working madly to distribute that shit
In people working madly to dodge it
In indexes,
And all of the things that are left un-indexed
And all of those that will never make the cut

I am interested in fungus and rot
In weird and beautiful mushrooms that grow in the dark woods

In information explosion
In logic and in Pascal,
who said a long time ago that the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know
In Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said that our difficulty is, that we keep speaking of simple objects,
and are unable to mention a single one

I am interested in questioning the digital divide
In crossing bridges
In finding common grounds
In trying to breathe

I am interested in the black BMW’s
In the shiny Mercedes
In groups like Earth on Empty
Artists in Action

In wealth
In the Theatre of the Oppressed and Augusto Boal
In Saul Alinsky and Community Organizing
In the words of Winston Churchill, who said that
Money is like a sixth sense, essential for the complete use of the five others.

In stock markets
In crashes
In rise of opportunities
In bad luck In the absence of luck
In Boom or bust economies
In Power In mechanisms of exchange

In high tech and in low tech things of all kind

I am interested in parsing text files
In Apple C
Apple X
Apple V
Esc
Esc
Option
command
F
O

In apples with worms
In the names that are given to computer viruses
Like Clone
War 547
C Magic
COCO2099
Crazypunk.500
Dark_Revenge.1024
DarkApocalypse
Tiny.family

Or the names that are given to racehorses
Like Exaggerate This
Or Trick Again
Or Sightseek who won $630.000 so far this year

I am interested in databases In electrical diagrams In the taste of wine In Pong

In ping pong

I am fascinated with weather, hurricanes in particular
I am interested in models of analysis
And in seeing how they can be used in an art context
I am interested in the names that are given to future storms

Arthur
Bertha
Cristobal
Dolly
Edouard
Fay
Gustav
Hanna
Ike
Josephine
Kyle
Laura
Marco
Nana
Omar
Paloma
Rene
Sally
Teddy
Vicky
Wilfred

Those are the Atlantic storm names for 2008

The most intense hurricane to have hit the mainland United States remained unnamed.
It was in 1935 and was a category 5
With a Minimum Pressure of 892 mb

I am concerned about the repercussion of things
What happens when something is done?
What are the consequences of all actions?

I am interested in the politics of everything
The marketing of the politics
The reduction of the marketing
Newspapers
The online editions of the newspapers
The top stories

The breaking news
The exclusive interviews
The talk shows
I am interested in the wit of the guests
The waste of time
The length of life
The shadows of puppets on the walls
Brightly lit by pepper kits
Sold in advance
Sold out to the crowd
I am amazed that Oprah is on the cover of her magazine every month
I read that Oprah is the leading source for information about life and love

I am interested in pocket PCs
In the culture of pick pocket pcs
In the point and click
In the click and disappear
In the cyclical nature of fashion
In Simple Text Messages
In Thoreau talking about the telegraph
In how loud people talk on their cell phones on the buses
On the complexity of the discussions
And how others are trapped inside this dialog
Delicate choices have to be made between broccoli and asparagus
Between Bits & Bites and Vegetable Thins
All during the ride home on the train.

I am puzzled on why there is a 1-800 number on every box and every bag.
I have never bookmarked anything of Kraft, Pepsi or GM on my browser.

I like to look in the dictionaries
And bounce from one word to another
From one image to another

I believe that the world can be explain through anecdotes

 

Aug 6, 2004
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How many luxury cars in your town? (2004)

still-hmlciyc

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

chroma_frontal_1fender
chroma_frontal_redfender chroma_frontal_twofenders Picture-1 Picture-2 Picture-3logo_pict

May 7, 2004
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Blog 1979 (2004)


[Jacques Dubé, Jean-Marc Dugas et Daniel Dugas]

Twenty-five years ago I went on a hitchhiking trip around Canada and the USA.  I kept an obsessively detailed journal of my adventures.  The voyage started in Moncton, New Brunswick, on June 27, 1979 and ended, back in Moncton, on September 2.  During these 68 days I hitched 115 rides and walked 363.5 kilometers.  I ate parsley for three days straight, morning, noon and evening, with Jeffrey.  He had a pack sack full of it and was happy to share the green stuff.  One morning I stood half awake in a bank lineup in San Francisco only to be shaken by the biggest earthquake there in 68 years.  I got robbed a couple of times, once by an ex Hell’s Angel who was mad that I did not carry a camera.  I got kicked out of a crowded van, in the middle of the night by a troop of Moonists en route for a “retreat” in the Valley.  I made a big mistake by putting my hand in Teresa’s pants while sleeping in the back of a transport truck.  The truck driver was giving Byron, his girlfriend Teresa and me a ride from South Carolina towards New York… My rudimentary English of that time, my mouth harp, and my innocence probably saved my life many times.

 

Recently while cleaning some old boxes I found the journal, which I thought was lost long ago. This blog re-tells some of my stories.

 

Starts again: June 27, 2004

 

see blog

 

May 7, 2003
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Nuclear Mickeys (2003)

• Nuclear Mickey, digital prints with sound, Disaster Group Exhibition, Truck, Calgary, AB, 2004
• TSCharlie & Co, digital prints, Faculty exhibition, ACAD, Calgary, AB, 2004

Nuclear Mickeys (Images)
The Disneylandization of fears and the Benettonning of all experiences

The Nuclear Mickeys is a series of manipulated images of nuclear explosions that got a fashion makeover for easy and safe consumption.  The grafting of a Mickey Mouse head on the top of the mushroom cloud brands the disaster, and creates a cultural event, much like the Benetton publicity campaigns of the 1990’s.

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

The first atomic bomb was detonated at Los Alamos, New Mexico on July 6, 1945. Upon witnessing the first test of a nuclear weapon, the Diroctor of The Manhattan Project stated:

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer

666 seconds of Oppenheimer’s hesitation (Sound)

While listening to the sound file of the quote, I became fascinated by the silences and hesitations of Oppenheimer.  The historic audio recording of Oppenheimer was 58 seconds in length. Of those 58 seconds, 28 seconds were comprised of silences and hesitations. This audiowork is made up of the hesitations repeated 23.78 times, to create a new track 11 minutes and 6 seconds, or 666 seconds in length.  The silence became for me, the incarnation of our ‘loss of grip’ on ‘ the social meaning of nuclear weapons’

Daniel Dugas, Calgary, April 2004

May 6, 2003
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Easy Not Easy (2003)

• Prairie Tales 6th Annual Tour of Alberta Film & Video, touring, 2004
• Faculty show, ACAD, Calgary, AB, 2003

For some it is facile and for others it is difficult. Easy not easy is a tape about Institutions of Power, Economic Systems and how the two direct and permeate society and culture.

 

Mar 23, 2003
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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)

 

 

Daniel H. Dugas

Artiste numérique, poète et musicien, Daniel H. Dugas a participé à des expositions individuelles et de groupe ainsi qu’à plusieurs festivals et événements de poésie en Amérique du Nord, en Europe, au Mexique et en Australie. Son treizième recueil de poésie « émoji, etc. » / « emoji, etc. » vient de paraître aux Éditions Basic Bruegel.

Daniel H. Dugas is a poet, musician, and videographer. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions as well as festivals and literary events in North America, Europe, Mexico, and Australia. His thirteenth book of poetry, 'émoji, etc.' / 'emoji, etc.' has been published by the Éditions Basic Bruegel Editions.

Date : Mars / March 2022
Genre : Poésie / Poetry
Français / English

émoji, etc. / emoji, etc.

Date: Mai / May 2022
Genre: Vidéopoésie/Videopoetry
Français/English

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