Ellen Moffat is a multi-media artist currently based in Saskatoon. Originally from Toronto, Moffat has lived and worked throughout much of Canada. Her work includes interactive and multi-media installation as well as sound works. Her interests can be grouped under overarching themes of identity and migration. However, her most recent emphasis has been on language and the voice. She allows viewers to become participants, recombining words to make text based work or to make compositions from phonemes, discrete units of speech. Moffat explores the possibilities of voice and text in their capacity for varied signification through recombination as well as their irreducible otherness.
We are currently privileged to have Ellen take part in one of the BlackFlash 2.0 conversations with curator and scholar Michelle Kasprzak. To read what they have to say about new media and interactivity, read the conversation. Please note that the posts are ordered from newest to oldest. To read the conversation in its entirety, please scroll down to the bottom.
Twicescore, 2008
The quote below is taken from Ellen Moffat’s website:
twicescore is a multi-user visual poetry instrument using dual keyboards and physical controllers. Two keyboards provide physical interfaces for text generation with controllers for manipulation of type as typographic design. The separate texts are projected as integrated concentric circles onto a bed of glass bead on the floor. Poems can be posted to a web site as a publishing outlet and public archive. Inspired by ”zuverspaetceterandfigurinnennenswert ollos”, a 1962 rota-poem by Ferdinand Kriwet, the project fuses interactivity, co-authorship and concrete poetry.
The boundary between collaboration and co-authorship is blurred, and artistic disciplines differ in their uses and interpretations of the terms. However, the terms are distinct. Collaboration and co-authorship are strategies for production and participation that contest individualistic art experiences without denying either the individual’s engagement or the individual subject. They posit new connections with art as an object, a relational experience or a network. They also connect with gaming and play.
My graduate advisor, André Jodoin, insisted that collaboration started with the project’s point of conception, sort of like birth. Without the co-generation of the original concept as a shared process, the project was not a true collaboration. I take a softer approach to collaboration although I find the strictness of André’s interpretation useful and appealing in its clarity. For me, collaboration refers to projects and processes with shared resources and responsibility for production and realization of mutually defined goals.
Co-authorship relates to text, writing and composition using established structures with options for engagement and interaction. The structure functions as a set of parameters for participants, with options and choices for interpretation and invention. In my own work, I use the term co-authorship for projects which invite participants to modify existing scores. My reference is the original Fluxus notion of “do-it-yourself” which holds that “anyone can create work from any score, acknowledging the composer as the originator of the work while realizing the work freely and even interpreting it in far different ways than the original composer might have done.” Interpretation of the original text or composition passes authorship to the participant as a co-author.
The collective is a group of individual subjects. (Ideally) it endorses plurality and multiplicity. As a social aggregate, the collective is a socio-political entity that suggests society as a metaphor. Interaction among members of the collective may be enacted through collaborative and co-authoring actions.
