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

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)