Lost in the Memory Palace | The Dark Pool
I N T E R V I E W I N T E R V I E W collaborative editor. They go under my name because I write the scripts and conceptualize the project, but George acts like a very creative producer. He'll say, I don't think this section works, and I'll say, you're right, and then he says, this will be better. So it is a fine line between what is collaborative and what is individual.GBM: The walks are very much like filmmaking and I'm like a film editor. Now they involve videos as well so I edit the video.BC: Do you do the camera work on the video walks?JC: George does. I can't handle it. He wears girl's shoes so they sound like my shoes.GBM: We pretend it's Janet.BC: It's supposed to be your feet in the point-of-view shots?GBM: They're not high heels, okay. They're not girlie shoes. But for the Carnegie piece it took us three weeks to find a person with the right-sounding shoes.JC: There's one pair I've used for all my walks because they have a particular sound, not too clicky and not flat. It's got the right kind of heel. They are getting very worn out. For the video walks, George does the shot because the sound has to be recorded by a binaural mike at the same time as the video so he wears the other girlie shoes. Then I put my voice on top afterwards. With the audio walks I'm recording and quite often talking along with the walking. So it is subtly different, but I think it's conceptually interesting to people because you have this woman's voice saying, okay, turn to the left, and you assume the footsteps you hear are hers, but they're actually his.BC: Do you storyboard so that you know exactly what it is you're doing, or do serendipity and accident play into the process as well?JC: What we do is figure out which is the best route on site and then I generally stand around a lot and see what patterns evolve. On our first visit we do a lot of video tests, replay the tests on the site to see what actually interests us, and then I write the script so it'll be appropriate to the site. Then we go back a couple of weeks later and do the final audio or visual shooting. When I'm recording audio I may be speaking the lines or I may add the lines in the studio afterwards. By chance there might be two people walking by, talking, and that will be recorded and subtly work with the narrative; or there might be a car alarm in the background or something like that. Then we add tons of layered sound afterwards. I've only done two video walks. They are quite different because people are lining up the video reality with real reality, so you're using your visual information as well as auditory information. And they function quite differently from one another.BC: Are they obliged to be more like film than the audio walks?GBM: In the audio walks you're using reality as the visual of the film and the CD provides the soundtrack. What's different with the video walks is the hypnotic quality. The audio walks are hypnotic too, but there's something about moving back and forth between the video on the camera you're carrying and reality that makes the audio not as important–the image becomes much more important. People don't even notice that they're actually listening to a recorded sound; the sound becomes almost real to them, whereas when you're listening to the sound in an audio walk and you hear a car go by that you don't see, then you're really aware that it was recorded.JC: What is interesting with the audio walks is how they accentuate the visual and accentuate the reality. You know how it is when you're walking along, listening to music on a headset. It's like the real world becomes a film with a soundtrack. That's the way the audio walks work. I read in some recently published study how, if you put an audio reference cue before you show someone a visual thing, people will see the visual thing more intensely.BC: It's actually physiological, then?JC: Yes, and I didn't realize that. People just said to me, wow, it really accentuates the visuals. Why is that? And I didn't know. I just thought, because it was heightening your senses. But the video walks, where people are concentrating on the screen and what's happening there, become the reality and the real world becomes secondary. George has an earlier piece called Conversation Interrogation that some of these pieces really relate to, especially the video walks. What happens is that people sit down in a seat in front of a monitor and see George talking to a screen on the right, and then all of a sudden the screen cuts their image into the sequence, looking off-screen left. It appears as if they are watching themselves have a conversation in this room in the monitor. It's very strange; it's like taking your own body and throwing it into another space, in your mind. The video walks really relate to this sense of the way video talks to our particular consciousness of how media works. It can talk to us about how we relate to media and how it's very disorienting; it's not just off there. Our whole body has become part of it. 26 27 left: Janet Cardiff andGeorge Bures Miller,The Dark Pool, 1994-96, installation view,mixed media.Photographs courtesyPlug In gallery,Winnipeg.right: Janet Cardiff andGeorge Bures Miller,The Dark Pool. Janet Cardiff andGeorge Bures Miller,The Dark Pool, 1996, installation view,mixed media.Photograph courtesyLuhring Augustine, New York. Robert Enright, "Pleasure Principals: The Art of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller," Border Crossings (78) 2001.