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 everything in our society manipulates us–sidewalks, road signs. To me it's a non-issue; only in Canada is it ever brought up.GBM: To me it's like a magical mystery. You're trying to discover something; it's almost as if you're on a treasure hunt. There's a very childlike aspect to it.BC: Is that the reason the narratives are fragmented? There seem to be, not necessarily competing, narratives, but different ones. So the listener has to figure out what is the story being told. Is that a deliberate strategy of incompletion and fragment?JC: In a simple way the narrative is a strategy to get people to walk. Because the subtext of the piece is really the text. This idea that people are walking in my footsteps, hearing what I heard, is important to me. In ways they're becoming cyborgs and there's this weird intimacy that happens. The narrative enables that because they can feel as if they're going to unravel a story. I use the conditioning of society to unravel the story. But I'm not interested in a sense of completion at the end. The type of short stories, novels and films I've always enjoyed are the ones that leave me wondering. You want to get a certain sense of completion and some of my walks aren't successful because they leave people too unconnected. It's a very fine line between connection and abstraction.GBM: That's what we're working towards–to see how much information is too much. We're always taking out lines and putting in lines during the editing. And we're always re-recording when we're editing.JC: Or if there's a way to say it with sound, rather than going to a direct voice. It's much better if you can tell someone something in a peripheral way, or in metaphors. In the art world you have the freedom to do that sort of thing. In making Hollywood films you have to fill in all the blanks and that's mostly why I can't stand them. They tell you everything. I like coming in at the middle of a film and then figuring out who the characters are and what are their relationships. It's the only way to watch a Hollywood film.GBM: That was what we were trying to do with Muriel Lake. You're thrown into the middle of this film and you have no idea what the relationships are. Then it's over before you ever figure them out.BC: In The Dark Pool, there is an entrancing narrative fragment about the dangers of reaching into the oily pool. What is its source? JC: I think we got the idea from reading a lot of Jorge Borges and the way he creates mythological places and these time-travelling environments. When we were writing this stuff, I liked the idea that there was a place that we called The Dark Pool that could defy all the known laws of science. George is always reading me these articles on wacky science concepts and stuff like that, so I think it probably comes from him. He has a much more scientific mind. I had the idea of a story about a pool on which nothing could float. You could stick your hand in it and it would disappear. So there was this alternative reality. But it's also a metaphor for the brain. The whole environment is a metaphor for how artists work on things that don't seem to make any sense. Artmaking is really an inexplicable activity. The work used the analogy of a scientific couple working in a room researching, and they just leave all this stuff and disappear. It's a portrait of George and me working away on these things.BC: It's interesting you would say that The Dark Pool is a portrait, because going through it seems like being on a journey inside the head of someone who makes art. GBM: Yes. But we really wanted to create a space as if you'd fallen outside the gallery. You go through this door and you're in somebody's attic or something. It's dark and dimly lit and then these sounds start triggering.BC: There is a gothic sense mixed with a certain kind of absurd humour, like when you encounter a stand where you buy knick-knacks. But what about the gothic? Did you want that theatrical darkness, with hanging heads and all the severed digits?GBM: That was what we wanted at the time. It's all coming back now. It was a reaction, in a way, to the cleanliness of the Canadian art world. We'd discussed this piece for a long time and we wanted to do something that was totally over the top and layered and encrusted and really, really hard to set up. We wanted to make this environment where people would feel they weren't anywhere near a gallery or a museum. As if they've fallen outside the whole art system.JC: We did a hypertext thing on the Internet when it was shown at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff. It relates to the way the Internet and hypertext works, because the stories come off each other. The main thing is an older woman talking about her journey to The Dark Pool. She's a really elderly lady with a British voice whom we've used a couple of times. There's also a love story between Allan and Tara. It was actually based on a friend called Allan (his picture is in there), and about a relationship he had with a beautiful, young, ideal woman, who didn't really exist. So these narratives entwined. She was this Ingmar Bergman character, who would come down the stairs. He had an incredibly messy house and she'd float down the stairs in this beautiful spring dress. Anyway, it's the personal stories we see that come back into the piece.GBM: Then we layered our own story on top of all the fictional narratives. It's very encrusted and we really wanted people to trigger it as they moved around. The music starts up over in this corner and then you hear Judy Garland play over here. And there was a cup with a string attached to it, and someone's yelling hello, hello.JC: And the wish machine, which was quite interesting because people would write a lot of wishes. This wish machine was built from an electronic circuit diagram out of a book called On The Fringes of Science that George had been reading. It's a very wacky book written by a physicist.GBM: He had all these experiments that he believed actually worked, so you could build a cardboard pyramid to keep your razor sharp 200 times longer than normal. He was talking about all these things that work and we don't know why they work, and that this will be the science of the next century. The wish machine was one of these things that supposedly could kill bugs in your garden. We wanted to take it beyond bugs in the garden, so we just told people to put their wishes in and we got amazing results.JC: Especially in New York. Kids saying, I wish mommy's boyfriend would stop hitting her.BC: So all that psychodrama was going on inside the piece as well?GBM: Yes, and we were building our own perfect space in a way too, because we had all these popular mechanical magazines and books everywhere and an encyclopedia from 1910. So basically it was a resource room that had stopped gathering resources. But you could go in there and sit down and read the various encyclopedias.JC: It was interesting how the idea of knowledge in 1910 was so ridiculous and in another 100 years people are going to look at our idea of knowledge and say, oh, how ridiculous, they didn't know why 32 33 Robert Enright, "Pleasure Principals: The Art of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller," Border Crossings (78) 2001.