High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese plays Norway!

The collaborative project High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, developed through Oxygen’s Artist in Residence program, was featured in an international exhibition at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference and Festival in Bergen, Norway in August.

High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese is an interactive website exploring Chinese immigration and settlement in British Columbia. The work includes poetry by Fred Wah and interviews with Nelson and Vancouver community members as well as original music, graphics and video.

The project was selected to be exhibited in “Decentering: Global Electronic Literature” at Gallery 3,14 in downtown Bergen. Projects in this exhibit included both historical and contemporary works from Russia, Portugal, Brazil, Peru, Canada and Poland.

According to the exhibition catalogue, “This diverse collection of works provided an opportunity to consider how practices and genres in electronic literature are influenced both by the exchange of ideas on the global network and by important national and regional artistic traditions.”

Project director Nicola Harwood presented the project and gave an artist talk to a packed room of interested participants, artists and scholars and had these comments on her experience in Bergen,

“The festival featured participants and projects from all over the world. Three different contemporary exhibition spaces held installations, web-based works, digital works and video / performance and sound pieces. It was a highly stimulating experience and gratifying to receive very positive feedback on our project. People expressed to me how engaged they found the depth of content, the beautiful graphics and interesting stories. They were also impressed by the collaborative nature of the project. Collaborations of this size and scope are relatively rare in the genre of digital art and literature and people wanted to know how we did it. I told them: Slowly! And of course with the support of Oxygen Art Centre, who saw the project through from beginning to end.”

High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese will soon become part of the Electronic Literature Organization’s third on-line collection of work, ELC3, meant to archive and make accessible projects of excellence in electronic literature.

To visit the project see: www.highmuckamuck.ca

High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese was produced as a special project of the Oxygen Art Centre (Link here for more information)