“Fame is not fastidious about the lips which spread it. So long as there are mouths to reiterate the one name, it does not matter who they are.”
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

talk mainstream is a Twitter Transitivity* project exploring how language 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 two other lists of verbs and locales

Thanks to:
Charles Hines: Apple script
Andrew Spitz: Twitter to MAX

*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

Le Nouveau Brunswick aspire à l’autosuffisance en de débarrassant d’un outil essentiel à son développement. Comment allons nous être autosuffisants si nous devenons économiquement dépendants de nos voisins?  C’est comme si un naufragé jetait son gilet de sauvetage en échange d’une vague promesse d’être repêché.  Énergie NB est en dérive parce qu’elle est mal gérée et c’est probablement pour cela que son président David Hay reçoit des bonus.

Si on est vraiment intéressés à avoir des tarifs encore plus bas, pourquoi ne pas vendre une partie du Madawaska, ou peut-être l’île Miscou tout entière.  Et pendant qu’on y est, pour baisser le prix du lait qui ne cesse d’augmenter, Shédiac, Bouctouche et la Sagouine pourraient être cédés en bloc au plus offrant.  Une partie des profits pourrait sûrement être utilisés pour payer une autre firme de marketing afin de trouver un autre slogan qu’ ÊTRE…ICI ON LE PEUT.   La vente d’Énergie NB veut dire exactement le contraire :  ICI…ON NE PEUT PAS ou ON N’EN PEUT PLUS

Cher Mr. Graham, même si l’excellent slogan de la nationalisation d’Hydro Québec en 1962 était : MAÎTRE CHEZ NOUS, ils n’ont pas besoin de l’être chez nous.  Si vous aimez troquer pourquoi ne pas faire comme la ville de Clark au Texas qui a échangé son nom pour DISH.  En échange les résidents de la ville ont reçu, gracieuseté de DISH Network, un service de télévision de base pour dix ans ainsi qu’un magnétoscope numérique.

On pourrait changer le nom de notre province pour Bombardier pour avoir le privilège de faire une heure de Sea Doo dans la baie de Shédiac à chaque été ou Molson en échange d’une caisse de 12 à chaque Noël.  On pourrait même faire un référendum!

Chandelier Accident has been selected to be part of the Zero Filme project in Portugal.  The project will be launch July 18 in Lisbon and July 25th at the Estaleiro Cultural Velha-a-Branca in Braga.

I drove, this first weekend of spring, to Fredericton, New Brunswick to screen the 10^th edition of Prairie Tales.  The NB film Coop, who was hosting the presentation, has been a supporter of the project for some time. The cultural centre, where the Coop has its offices, was very busy as there were a number of others events happening in the building concurrently.  This abundance of activities probably contributed to a smaller turnout.  Nevertheless one member of the audience drove over two hours to see the works!  And that is saying a lot as the highways were invaded by hordes of deer!

One of the things I love about Prairie Tales is its diversity of genre and approach but what really strikes me, this year as in previous years, is the creative energy and artistic ability that can be found in Alberta.  By viewing the program one can feel that there is a vigorous discourse that is being nurtured.  The screening prompted discussions about film, video, networking, and the media arts across Canada.  

In the darkness of the Doodles Café, where the screening took place, I felt something that I never felt before.  As I was looking at the program, I was seeing markers; landscapes, back alleys of Calgary and Edmonton, and in this familiarity of surroundings, I felt homesick!  Alberta, and more specifically Calgary, has been my home, on and off, for over 15 years.  I have recently relocated to Moncton, New Brunswick, my other home.  I am very proud to have been part of this year’s selection but I also feel privileged to have been able to contribute to the artistic vitality of the amazing place that is Alberta!   

March 30, 2009 -Moncton NB

Prairie Tales 10
The latest collection of short film and video works by Alberta media artists.
Presented by Edmonton’s Metro Cinema Society.

Madame la Gouverneur générale

Je suis déçu d’apprendre que vous avez accordé à Monsieur Harper l’autorité de fermer le Parlement.  Tristement on dirait une scène de Ubu Roi.  Le Premier Ministre, incapable de mesurer la gravité de ses actions a créé une situation explosive.  Nous voilà du coup replongé dans des tiraillements régionaux sans fins et ce en plein milieu d’une crise économique mondiale.  La hargne des conservateurs envers les députés du Bloc Québécois est un geste abject qui n’a pas sa place dans une démocratie.  La prochaine étape est sûrement de les proscrire, de les chasser de la colline.  Notre Premier Ministre n’est pas un rassembleur, il est de ceux qui attisent les divisions.  Régner par la dissension n’est pas une nouveauté, ce qui est nouveau ici c’est votre soutien, votre approbation.

Je suis bouleversé quand je regarde le comportement arrogant de Monsieur Harper.  Je suis consterné quand j’entends le discours aliénant des conservateurs. Quelle fourberie! Je pense aux jeunes qui regardent ce qui se passe et je me dis que ce n’est pas un très bon point de départ, que ce n’est pas une belle éducation.  Une des priorités de votre mandat est le programme jeunesse.  Vous encouragez les jeunes « à tisser des réseaux de solidarité entre eux et à s’allier la collaboration des autres générations dans leurs projets »  En soutenant le gouvernement vous encouragez la jeunesse à s’abîmer dans le désillusionnement.  Si la démocratie peut si facilement être détournée, ici chez nous, au Canada, quelles sont les chances pour quelle puisse vraiment exister ailleurs?

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.

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.