These are the notes from the presentation. My parts are in bold:
Janet Cardiff is a Canadian born artist who works mainly with Sound Walks and Sound Installations. Although she has done her own work, most of the stuff she produces at the moment, she collaborates with her husband, George Bures Miller. Some notables pieces of work by here are the “Forty Part Motet” and “The Dark Pool” whom she worked with her husband on. We will show some of these examples later (now?). Her most recent audio walk as she calls it is the Alter Bahnhof Video Walk. Which leads us onto...
So, she does sound walks similar to what we’ve done in class, she likes to call them audio walks. This is where she takes listeners on a journey or tells a story around certain locations. For example with Alter Bahnhof video walk, users can get a iPod and headphones from a check out booth in Germany and listen to it as they walk round the station. The audio walks she does are on a number of different ideas and scenarios, meaning she is quite flexible in what she does. Examples of this are her works, words drawn in water where takes listeners for a tour around the area of the Mall in Washington and one I found really interesting, is her Ghost Machine audio walk. In this she takes listeners to an old fashioned theatre and round the rooms where audiences were not allowed. It follows the story of a woman visiting a man and getting himself arrested. And then towards the end of the walk, I’m quoting her by saying “The final scene is on the stage where, when you turned to see a whole audience watching, you realise that all along you have been a part of a play.” Quoting her again about her audio walks, she has said “Sometimes I don’t really know what the stories in my walks are about. Mostly they are a response to the location, almost as if the site were a Rorschach test that I am interpreting”.
She has moved into using video with her audio walks recently as shown by the Alter Bahnhof Video Walk. In the video, you can hear it uses binaural audio, as we learnt with Sam and Bryony, to give a 3D stereoscopic sound to her walks. In this sense, a lot of her walks appear to have a ominous or creepy atmosphere to them as it’ll usually be here voice, sounding emotionless, and then something eerie in the background. An example of one of these walks in this one, The Missing Voice, so if you’d like to plug your headphones in and see what it sounds like. [NEXT SLIDE] http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/missing_voice.html This one is obviously meant to be sinister, but there are others such as the walk where she takes you round a mall and you hear her voice and then a male singer, singing “Old man River”, directly into your right ear, and if you close your eyes, it feels like his presence is right next to yours and to me personally, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.
Although we’re asked to research a sound practitioner,even though she is one, I’d also say she’s an artist and tries to invoke thoughts and feelings from her listeners. For example, in her “Taking Pictures” audio walk, she says on her site that she was interested in how she could transform the feeling of a summer forest with photographs taken from the site in the Winter. This shows that her work is meant to spark thought. And mentioning her “Taking Picturees” audio walk, she also uses the photographs as well as videos in her walks, so it’s not just about the sound but also the imagery involved.
Janet Cardiff has stated in an interview that she uses binaural audio when recording her audio walks as already mentioned. She says that she records on site and follows the route you would take when listening to her audio walks. The way she does it, is by mounted two microphones in the ears of a dummy head. As you can see by the picture. Because of the head shape, it reproduces the way we hear. Apparently, she says “she gets many looks and comments from people as I wander around with this blue (hairdressers dummy) head held out in front of me.
http://www.cardiffmiller.com/press/texts/kg_jc-interview.pdf
This is probably one of her simplest installations yet I personally like it the best as it’s very easy to understand how it works and what it’s potentially trying to say. What makes this slightly different to some of her other work is that it is completely reliant on the audience, what sounds are created completely depends on how many people are in the room and whereabouts they are standing, without them nothing would happen it would simply be silent. In a way it’s a bit like the question if a tree falls in a forest but no-one is there to hear it does it still make a sound? This project shows us that without people, and movement there is no sound at all both in a scientific and philosophical sense.
The Carnie is a different type of work as it is freestanding and is activated simply by a ‘start button’. This installation uses memories and nostalgia to change the way people perceive it and influence how they are feeling. By using recognisable sounds that relate to the carousel and distorting them in the way she has, along with the use of shadows, Cardiff is taking a familiar childhood memory and turning it into something very eerie and questionable, ‘transforming the carnival ride into a layered and evocative encounter’. The truth is a lot people find the carnival very scary yet when it is looked back on in later years it is always seen as an exciting, happy place this installation changes that.
This is one of Cardiff’s most famous projects, she herself explains it by saying that ‘I want the audience to able to experience a piece of music from the viewpoint of the singers. Enabling the audience to move throughout the space allows them to be intimately connected with the voices. It also reveals the piece as a changing construct… you can hear the sound move from one choir to another, jumping back and forth, echoing each other and then experience the overwhelming feeling as the sound waves hit you when all the singers are singing.’ In the way it works this is a sort merge between the two previous types of installation. Although it is a freestanding piece that works on it’s own accord the route which you choose to take across the room will change how you hear the music as each speaker only projects one individual voice, by staying in the middle you hear them all together.
In conclusion, although a lot of her pieces are very similar they are all very interesting
She has had a clear influence on the sound artists of today, we even found a clip online which in the description mentioned being inspired by her.
A lot of her work concentrates on emotions and how we feel.
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