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2002
1st Annual BEYOND TEXT FESTIVAL,
July 26 - 28 2002 at Beyond Baroque

M o b i u s  T e x t (Video excerpt)
Tony's side of the Mobius Text (Text)

“Mobius Text”
Typed scroll on fabric, archived and displayed in The Arthur & Mata Jaffe Collection at Florida Atlantic University Library, Boca Raton, Florida."
Mata and Arthur Jaffe Rare Books Collection


M O B I U S   T E X T

The process of writing the Mobius Text is a collaborative performance between the audience and the artists. Unlike the writing process that typically happens in private, the writing of the Mobius Text takes place in the public space of the library and is in fact dependent upon the participation of audience members to read to the typists. By performing in spaces such as public libraries, the artwork itself is part of the library space in its context and its making.

Portions of the library's archives are accessed by the artists and recontextualized on the infinite page of the Mobius cloth. As patrons read from their favorite book to the typist another level is added to the multi level syntax. The two typists abandon the beginning, middle and end blueprint that has been the standard for narratives in favor of a non-linear poetic form of infinite verse. The typists pursue language with no destination in mind and share what William Burroughs called the "third mind”.

The final text leads to no conclusions or ideologically solidified meanings. The scribes write with a kind of symbiotic syntax that can accommodate rapid formations of associations and metaphors in the third mind. Often times the reading of the Mobius produces laughter and release from the normal strictures of prose writing. The endless Mobius strip accommodates the past, the present and the future with equality, creating a lucid space and time where unexpected meanings emerge from the collisions of unrelated words, phrases and sentences.

Alexi Morrissey
Tony Allard
January 27 2003