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 JC: I think it's the same thing. It confuses the viewer because we think that video is just something that's controlled by us, and all of a sudden the video is controlling the machinery in real time, like in George's Jump piece or else the video and the TV screen are becoming the reality. And it is dislocating. What I find interesting is the "Aha!" experience you get when you catch something you can't really explain–like how we're integrating with media, how we're reacting, how we understand perception and how we understand reality. BC: Is the purpose of the collaborations to confuse the sensory apprehension of what it's like to be in the real world? Every critic comments about a dislocation that leads to some extraordinarily intense perceptual pleasure. BC: Does the place give you its rhythms for the audio walks?JC: I go there and I see. It's very much like the traditional analogy of how Rodin would look at a piece of marble and know what he would do. When I'm walking the site, it gives me ideas and situations–this could be cool here, this kind of sound would work well here. The site gives me ideas.BC: So does the story come out of the sound fragments?JC: What's weird about it is that it's like writing three-dimensionally. If I'm writing, I'll videotape the particular route and site I think will work the best. A route has to be constructed so that it's got texture. It goes back to traditional media; it's like a drawing where the viewer will be affected by a particular type of texture. So as I'm walking, I videotape the whole route and then I write the script. Some-times the pacing works on paper but it won't work on site. The words have to resonate with the site in a particular way. The thing about the walks is that because the physical environment is always changing, you can do one several times in the same site and it will be completely different. Sometimes I'll do the walk and things won't line up and then at other times I'll be testing one and I'll say in the script, a man is walking in front of me, and there will be a man walking in front of me or the lime green car will be there. Then you say, oh yes, it's happening today, the world is in complete order. The synchronicity really freaks people out.GBM: The synchronicity is weird. I tested it five times at Meunster. There's a spot where she says there's a red car parked on the street and every time one came up. It was a different red car but it was too freaky.BC: Allen Ginsberg has this notion that "mind is shapely." That the actual process of the mind doing things ultimately ends up in some form or structure.JC: I believe that. I remember Kaspar Koenig telling me the first time he did a walk was at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark and a helicopter went by on the soundtrack, and he looked up and there was a helicopter going by above him. I think that's the moment he invited me to the Muenster Sculpture Project. He thought, if this woman can control the world, she should be in my show.BC: When you're involved in scoring and layering the piece with sound, what's the content, as far as that idea of sensory apprehension goes?JC: Sound enters your body without any filters, whereas, I think, visually our brain has a way of analyzing what's coming in. I can sit there and I can stare and stare and not really see anything. With sound you can't really do that.GBM: Also the way we record the audio makes it even less perceptible as a medium because we're using the Kunst-kofp Binaural System of recording, so that basically your senses are being fooled. You're not sure what you're hearing, especially because quite often it's recorded on location. In The Muriel Lake Incident we set up this miniature theatre but we recorded the sound in a real theatre. So aurally you sense the presence of a giant theatrical space. It's another dislocation of the senses.JC: It creates 3D sound images.GBM: You have a microphone in each ear basically, so it reproduces the way we hear. It's an old recording technique they've used ever since they invented stereo. It's just much more effective now with digital technology because you have good microphones and it's totally clean, without any hiss. It doesn't work if you play it over loudspeakers but when you play it on headphones you're hearing exactly what the person who recorded it would hear. In Muriel Lake, you're looking at a miniature theatre–it's only about four feet by four feet–but you're hearing the sounds of a full movie re-recorded inside a large cinema.BC: You hear someone eat popcorn and it pisses you off.GBM: Yeah, Janet eating popcorn. That disjunction of the senses happens in the walks as well, but in the walks it's more disorienting because you don't know what's real and what's fake. You'll hear a car go by and you'll automatically stop because you think you're going to be hit.JC: Even in The Missing Voice in London, there's one part where a car comes down Wentworth Street and I say, stop and wait for the car. And even when I was replaying it to test it out I'd have to wait for that car. My body wouldn't allow me to step on the road, even though I knew it wasn't there. That's the thing about sound coming in an unmediated manner. I love it when children listen to 3D sound. They go crazy because they don't have any filters. 28 29 top: George Bures Miller, Imbalance 3, 1995, installation view,mixed media.Photographs courtesyPlug In gallery, Winnipeg.bottom: George Bures Miller, Imbalance 2, 1995, installation view,mixed media. Robert Enright, "Pleasure Principals: The Art of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller," Border Crossings (78) 2001.