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 pyramids kept razor blades sharp, or why this dark pool wasn't able to have anything floating on it, or why it was defying the laws of gravity.BC: So in one sense the whole piece was a projection into a doubtful future?GBM: But it was also about the accumulation of knowledge and how impossible it is to actually know anything.BC: Did you have sources for your notion of layering text and sound? Were there models–either literary or visual–that you had been thinking about?GBM: We were reading a lot of science fiction, a lot of Philip K. Dick. In some ways he's a really bad pulp writer but he has incredibly interesting and weird ideas. We were also reading William Gibson, the cyberpunk novelist.JC: And that fantastic book by Neil Stevenson called Snow Crash that has interesting ideas of layering and the analogy of cyberspace that relate to Borges and his Library of Babel. As well as to the original Tower of Babel.BC: What I find in your text are poetic moments that seem to be very suggestive, conscious writing. How much pressure do you put on yourself as a scriptwriter?JC: Quite a bit actually. The writing goes through tons and tons of modification. I consider myself quite a bad writer so I have to really work at it. The type of writers that I like are Michael Ondaatje; Coming through Slaughter is amazingly layered. Perhaps it's just where we are in our century or something. Because of editing on television we're able to understand the language of fragment and this structure of fragmentation. Kids today can read books, watch TV and listen to a CD at the same time and get meanings out of all of them. GB: A lot of Canadian writers have that layering sense Janet mentioned. Robert Kroetsch is an amazing Western writer.BC: One of his poetry books that I've always admired is Seed Catalogue. It has the line "bring me the radish seeds my mother whispered," a fragment that suggests a subtle degree of intimacy. The reason I raise it is because whispering has a lot to do with the way your pieces work. You're literally in the listener's ear and giving gentle instructions or teasing insinuations, like, "I'll tell you about that later." How does intimacy play into the work?JC: Something you said made me remember that when we were building The Dark Pool at the Walter Phillips Gallery, our nephew, he was 14 at the time and had lived on a boat all his life, came into the room and said, this is just like Myst. He understood it as a completely interactive world.GBM: Only it's three-dimensional Myst.JC: But he was touching everything as he went along, because his is a hands-on generation. But to answer your question more directly: intimacy is a really important part of it. To me it's like surrogate relationships. I get letters and e-mails from people all over the place about how important the walk was for them. It's a false intimacy that's set up, of course, but it's the same kind of intimacy that you get from a writer's voice when you're reading. This way it's actually connected to you. I think what accentuates it is that you hear the footsteps and you begin walking in the body and you hear my breath right behind you. It's as if I am part of their body.GBM: It's your voice as well. She's recording using a binaural head right at the back, so it's like her voice is tickling the back of your neck. Her voice isn't an actor's voice. We work very hard to get beyond acting, beyond reading. It seems to exist outside any kind of mediation, like a thinking voice, a voice inside your head. It's also pretty sexy.JC: It's a deliberately invisible voice. When I'm working with actors, I'm always saying, can you just make it a bit flatter? It's really, really hard to get it flat but with emotion.BC: George is right, it's a sexy voice. Is it caused by the circumstances of technology or are you actually working to insinuate yourself beyond what the technology can offer?JC: Well, I do say lines like, "I want you to walk with me," and then I sometimes accentuate the idea that we're together in the experience.GBM: I don't think we considered the quality of her voice when we started doing the walks. It just happened; it's something you can't define and it affects you in a certain way.BC: Are your own footsteps metronomic for you? As you're walking, it must be like having a drum beat.JC: Yeah, I'm monitoring at the same time as I'm recording, so I do hear them.BC: Your movement is embodied, then?JC: Yes. The reason I started doing these walks was because I was recording with the tape recorder out in the cemetery. I had a headset on and I was walking around doing research, just recording the names of the people on the headstones. I don't know what it was for; it was a totally senseless activity. Then I pressed stop and instead of pressing go again, I hit rewind by mistake, so I had to press play to find out where I was. All of a sudden I heard my voice describing what was in front of me and my footsteps walking, so I rewound it again and I went back to the exact places where I was recording and listened to the whole experience. I was electrified. It was really, really incredible. That's how I started doing walks. It was totally serendipitous.BC: Are you shooting here in Toronto because it's convenient or is it actually something you intended to do?GBM: We're shooting here because we're here. Is that right?JC: Mostly. We came for another reason but we had three days extra to blow and we knew a singer and a friend runs a bar.GBM: It seems like it's going to work out, we have the bar scene we needed to get.BC: Aren't you burning a barn as well?JC: A house. But that came after we knew we were coming here. We were thinking of inserting an image of a house burning because we're using this character who builds big fires. We thought, will we do it by making a model house? Then I remembered there's a derelict house on one of my father's farms. Maybe he'll burn it down for me. People haven't lived in it for 30 years. That's the way they do it in the country if they have to get rid of something. Next year it'll be a field.BC: I realize the Venice piece is a work-in-progress at this stage, but do you have a sense of what it will be by the time it opens at the vernissage?GBM: We have a sense and while everything changes, I don't think this one will change that much. It's definitely derived out of the Muriel Lake piece, but we wanted to make it more immersive and in a way more disorienting. It'll be a theatre for 16 people. You'll sit in a balcony situation overlooking a model of a theatre.JC: We're building a bigger version of Muriel Lake that you will actually sit in. You go into this particular situation and then experience what's on the screen as 34 35 Robert Enright, "Pleasure Principals: The Art of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller," Border Crossings (78) 2001.