ellen moffat

Gallery 12-14 Schleifmuhlgasse Contemporary, Vienna

Surface Resonance is a situated sound installation using the gallery’s windows as amplifiers with surface excitors as transducers to connect interior and exterior space as acoustic interfaces. The composition, constructed around harmonics and frequency modulation, references the serial method of the Viennese School. Sound is heard and felt as tangible, embodied experience through direct contact with the vibrating glass membrane. Ambient sound from the gallery mixes with sounds of the street, generating an evolving composition of fluctuating sound. The work was included in Discs, a 2-person exhibition with Michael Koch, curated by Denise Parizek.

Sound Samples: Field Recordings

Headphones or Speakers Required

<LISTEN>   Surface Resonance_Inside    01’58

<LISTEN>   Surface Resonance _Outside   01’35

Walper Hotel, CAFKA, Kitchener

ping ting tootle is a situated installation in the main stairwell of the Walper Hotel using existing fixtures, transducers, and live and recorded sound. Contact mics positioned behind brass handrails capture events on their surface — a hand sliding, a ring pinging, fingers strumming — and trigger recordings of spoken word and cell phone rings. Hotel guests, staff and visitors perform the stairwell through intentional or chance actions, releasing or creating spoken word, technological tones and percussive rhythms. Output to multiple speakers, sound animates the stairwell as residue and improvisational sound.

<LISTEN_1>  PingTing4   00’25

<LISTEN_2>  PingTing3   00’25

23rd Street, Saskatoon

urbansubsonic is a field study using urban structures and chance events as material to construct a sonic map of a site in downtown Saskatoon. Recordings employ a 1913 prism glass sidewalk as a soundboard with 4 microphones positioned spatially. As pedestrians traversed its 90′ long surface, the membrane vibrated with the impact of their actions. Filtered through an aggregate of glass, concrete, wood and metal, pedestrian sound events  fuse with the room tone and acoustics of the contained space, creating a murky yet distinctly urban sonic sensibility. The composition is a 24’00 time-based sampler from twenty-four hours of field recordings.

<LISTEN_1>   urbansubsonic (03:15-04:01)    00’46

<LISTEN_2>   urbansubsonic (04:20 – 05:13)  00’53

<LISTEN_3>   urbansubsonic (0:00 – 08:34)    00’33

<LISTEN_4>   urbansubsonic (13:37 – 14:43)   00’56

<LISTEN_5>   urbansubsonic (23:35 – 24:00)  00’25

Residency project, Confederation Centre for the Arts, Charlottetown

ReCALL is a video projection in a storefront window in downtown Charlottetown. During the residency, I developed a textual inventory of smells, rhythms, folklore and colloquialisms as the “invisible residue” of place with input from a cross-section of folklorists, librarians, artists, business people and old-timers. The juxtaposition of text, digital images and scanned maps of the island posited the local voice, local traditions, collective knowledge and personal memories in the public arena. Ambient street noises provided a real-time sound scape.

Future Cities, Art Gallery of Hamilton

Civil Fugue uses the panels of bicycle stands in downtown Hamilton to mount twelve image and text panels as a gesture of repositioning local voices in the public sphere. The text was generated through meetings with participants from diverse sectors in the city as a sampler of attitudes about the future public space in Hamilton. Juxtaposed with a satellite image of Hamilton, the text maps the voice as a live feed of public opinion.

Guessed House (2004)

Utopia Station, Arsenale, Venice Biennale

In Our Beautiful Future was an eight-person collaborative banner and poster project with Martha Rosler and the FLEAS Collective, an international group of socially-engaged artists. As a collective project on the theme of utopia, each member’s contribution was autonomous; as an assemble, they presented a heterogeneous voice.

My panel layers text on a satellite image of Saskatchewan as a opinion feed reflecting utopian dreams from my community. In the context of the Utopia Station Project at the Venice Biennale, local voices are brought into the international forum as a gesture of global connectivity. The banner was subsequently printed in Austrian newspapers through the Museums in Progress.

Prince Albert and Saskatoon

Track is an interactive public survey about time, daily activity and location. Participants clock in on a digital time recorder to enter the work; they receive a copy of a time sheet as a receipt. Then they proceeded with their business. To exit the work, they need to clock out with me and the time recorder. Participants who do not punch out live in the work for the rest of their lives.

There are two versions of the project. Track 1 surveyed the public space in downtown Saskatoon. I positioned myself in sites including street corners, park benches and a street market to engage with potential participants as faux scientist-surveyor. This version was part of the SPASM Public Art Project in Saskatoon. Track 2 used a gallery as its sociological site. Participants punched the time recorder upon entering and exiting the gallery, recording the length of time they spent in the gallery and with art. The results were published in the Gallery’s newsletter as a public record. The Little Gallery, Prince Albert.

City of Regina

PLAY is a functional spectator bleacher that also supports brightly coloured modernist fibreglas objects – sports equipment (baseball, soccer, tennis) and associated sports gear (jacket, running shoes). PLAY was commissioned by the City of Regina for the Lakeridge Sports Park, adjacent to a high school in Regina.

Lebret, Saskatchewan

Lebret’s history includes Metis and Church communities, a residential school and farming activities. As a sculptural installation and site marker INHERITANCE fuses text, materials and symbolic forms. Names reflecting cultural groups, families, institutions and historic moments are carved into wood that references railway ties; small field stones provide the ground cover. Local historians and cultural groups participated in the research; students at the Whitecalf Residential School assisted with production as a collective effort. It was completed during a residency in the Qu’Appelle Valley.