The Relationship Between Technology and Perception in Janet Cardiff’s Sound Art
New York, New York, October 2005
Times Square, 9am. To your right, trucks idle so loud your spleen quivers. To your left, a man screams an off-key aria for money. In front of you (or is it behind?), car alarms, horns, and sirens cascade. The modern metropolis is a barrage of sound—a crossfire of conversations, people and things that struggle to make themselves known in spite of the chaos. Maybe that’s why iPods are so successful in New York; muting cacophony on demand is a survival technique we depend on.
Canadian artist Janet Cardiff investigates sensorial dynamics like these, specifically the relationship between sound, physical isolation, and the “first person” experience. Her immersive installation art, often made with her partner and husband George Bures Miller, has won laurels such as the Millennium Prize and seduced Biennial juries from Venice to São Paulo. Her work is exhibited in museums all over the world and she currently holds billing at New York’s Luhring Augustine Gallery.
Her body of work—from site-specific audio walks to real-time web collaborations to a hand-built cinema—is varied in medium. It is anchored, however, in an emphasis on sound and an unconventional use of technology. Simultaneously exposed to the viewer and carefully integrated, Cardiff’s technology is both the centerpiece of and backdrop to her action, and her applications are critical to her process.
Her site-specific audio walks, such as Her Long Black Hair, a haunting Central Park audio walk commissioned by the Public Art Fund in 2004, envelope listeners by manipulating sensorial perception. And while each audio walk is different, she’s developed a process. Cardiff begins by researching the location and its history, myths, and secrets, and then crafts a script. The walk is recorded in binaural audio in situ; as she walks, Cardiff carries a mannequin with microphones in each ear so the recording will mimic what and how a person hears. Sometimes she speaks directly into the microphones, reciting words, phrases, non-sequitors, and stream of consciousness observations of varying degrees of truth. She begins The Missing Voice (Case Study B), her London audio walk, by saying provocatively, “I want you to walk with me.” It’s as much a threat as it is a request, and her voice is as smokey and come-hither as a torch singer.
Once the recordings for her audio walks are complete, Cardiff and Miller will begin the post-production process, mixing up to 32 tracks of natural and fabricated sounds, music, and more voices. The effect is prismatic and oneiric; the audio walks open a portal into a strange soundscape of subliminal drama and diagetic sound. The ephemeral quality is enhanced by the length of the pieces which average 10 to 60 minutes. They’re captivating—a phone conversation that could end at any second—so you hang onto every word.
Also with Miller, Cardiff has created high-definition video installations that further examine the relationship between sound and drama, particularly the psychological impact of surround sound. In The Berlin Files (2004), “sound” becomes personified—a mysterious character that lurks and morphs like fog—adding to the sense of foreboding.
Cardiff’s installations of the past decade share sophisticated designs and applications of technology, but Forty-Part Motet (2001), housed permanently in the National Gallery of Canada’s Rideau Street Convent Chapel, directly reveals sound’s power to beguile and enrapture visitors. It’s an engrossing audio installation in which forty separately recorded voices are played back through forty distinct, floor-standing loudspeakers. It’s a sculpturally conceived piece that examines spatial perception by letting visitors climb into a multidimensional moment.
The piece consists of two key components—technology and music. Forty speakers are arranged in an oval and play Spem in Alium, a masterwork by 16th century English composer Thomas Tallis. Tallis, known as the “father of English church music,” created deferential compositions for both Protestant and Catholic monarchs. The 12-minuteSpem in Alium is an elegy composed as a homage to the divine and scored for forty independent voices on the fortieth birthday of Queen Elizabeth I.
[DEFINITION OF MOTET: A polyphonic composition based on a sacred text and usually sung without accompaniment.]
Cardiff’s choice of the chapel is significant given the sacred soundtrack. The Rideau Chapel is a reconstructed, Neo-Gothic edifice with a concave ceiling and gold trim. (Rideau is the French word for curtain and relates to Canada’s Rideau River that bisects upper and lower Ontario.) On the floor behind the speakers are black wires—high-fidelity audio interconnection cables, thick as garden hoses. No attempt was made to tuck away or hide the technology; by exposing it, it becomes invisible.
Usually, something taken out of context becomes a complete lie, like a mini-fridge in the foreground of a Neanderthal cave painting. But in Forty-Part Motet, Cardiff’s replacement of people with speakers seems natural. She doesn’t mask the reality—a speaker is a speaker—but does this add pretense or strip it away? Does it create emotional depth or erode it? By replacing people with speakers, what is Cardiff suggesting about our ability to feel, trust, or distrust what we see versus what we feel? She seems to be suggesting that audio requires emotional vulnerability .
The piece begins not with the music but with the coughing, breathing, vocal exercises, and laughter of the choir. Circumnavigating the installation, visitors detect fragments of conversation. The listener can glean topics ranging from comments about the musical work to the enigmatic contemplation that defines Cardiff’s work. Amid the din, one voice adds the philosophical element found often in Cardiff’s work, saying, “As if life’s essence ebbs away.” It’s a roulette wheel of sorts—you never know where you’ll end up when the score begins again.
Suddenly, the clutter of conversation is replaced by the sound of a prominent male voice heard at one end of the configuration; his breath so shallow and short that his nervousness virtually wafts out of the speaker. He then breaks into his opening note and leads the chorus with resounding confidence.
This single voice captures the listener’s attention so completely it morphs into a full-fledged personality. Soon it’s easy to forget that it’s merely a loudspeaker producing sound. This inverting of the effect of ventriloquism—with those who encounter these works completely convinced that there is a person inside a loudspeaker or whispering in one’s ear—is a common occurrence in Cardiff’s work. She produces a personification of technology so compelling, it’s shocking to find that it’s merely cold, hard audio and video equipment at the heart of the piece.
The 12-minute Motet is a delicate yet direct conversation with imperfection; the composition rises and falls, rapidly at times, slowly in others, like the syncopated billowing of curtains. The score is also punctuated with silence, muted seconds that disorient but help underscore the drama of the music. Standing next to the speaker as it falls quiet suspends you in a lingering, palpable moment, an exaggerated sensation like the still air of a dream. There is a contrast—the listener is awake while the world is deeply sleeping.
Both audio and video have potential as informative mediums and vehicles for entertainment, but two-dimensional video tells us what to believe and the evocative quality of audio can tell us how to feel. Out of the two mediums, audio is the emotional transport. And in Forty-Part Motet, audio becomes more relevant as it stands without a visual element.
The shape of the circle is also significant. There are entry points between the segments of five speakers, but there is no beginning and no end. You have to just barge in. Concentricity also alters our sense of time and balance; the easy categories of “beginning” and “end” are muted, almost erased. Additionally, the circular nature of the speaker placement, and the repetitive nature of the piece, reflects today’s “always-on” thought process, the continuous stream of the subconscious (a continuity of discontinuous thoughts) that at times is an assault. Do we bridge the music instinctually as we walk around the circle? Do we anticipate what sounds will come next? We have a tendency to finish each other’s sentences, is Cardiff playing with that instinct? How does psychoacoustics (the way our ears process the audio information) relate?
Forty-Part Motet should not work—naked technology and sublime harmony is incongruent. Casual choir noises within the chapel seems vulgar. Yet everything coalesces, somewhat disarmingly.