Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: Pt II
4 of 5
21/02/14 2:24 PM
http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_itv_e/k15N0UpRnFSy6i3caPT9
And we spent an incredible amount of time on
Murder of Crows,
as well as the documenta
piece,
Forest,
which actually comes out of
Crows.
So
Forty Part Motet, Crows
and
Forest
are
all related, which ties nicely into the walks because you're in a forest and you hear the
recorded birds, but you also see real birds around you, or a plane goes by in the soundtrack,
and you can't tell whether it's a real plane or not. We spend a lot of time standing outside
with a microphone, actually.
ART iT:
What is your approach in a work like
Experiment in #F Minor
(2013), with the
fragments of music played back through speakers that respond to automated sensors?
JC:
We finished it right before the survey show which opened in April at Art Gallery of Ontario
in Toronto, and we probably could have used a couple more weeks on the piece. But
sometimes it's good that you have to throw it out because you could play with it for another
month. With this piece we liked the concept that you could have an unlimited possibility for a
piece of music according to where you are positioned, because if someone's standing in front
of one sensor, they're activating and hearing one six-second part of it. The whole composition
is a two-and-a-half-minute song that loops, so as you move around the table you hear
different parts, but you might not hear the end of the part beforehand, so you construct the
music through your movement. That was the conceptual basis for us, and now we realize it's
unlimited what you could do. You could do film soundtracks with footsteps and all sorts of
things, or you could do a whole orchestra.
GBM:
We're going to make another one perhaps.
JC:
You could have bigger speakers inside the table to create more base. You could move the
sensors apart so you don't have quite the mixture of sound that this one has. It gets pretty
intense. At the opening at Gallery Koyanagi it was constantly loud. I also like how people start
waving their hands over the table, while others stand back and watch these "performers," so
the audience becomes the performer.
ART iT:
If you don't know where the sensors are, it seems natural to explore the piece
through movement, to see whether you can control the intensity by waving your arms in one
direction or another. The work sucks you into performative behavior. With the walks too,
there's a mechanism of unconsciously entering a different zone of behavior.
JC:
You see how unlimited it could be. It's like an instrument.
GBM:
That's the problem for us. We're always discovering these things that could be
unlimited.
JC:
With
Pandemonium
(2005), for which we installed robotic percussive beaters in the cells
of the Eastern State Penitentiary Museum in Philadelphia, we discovered that was like an
instrument too. You could have made any piece of music with it. You could invite
percussionists in and say, here's an instrument, what do you want to do with it? There's all
these offshoots that would be great to follow through. Our problem is we have too many ideas
and not enough time.
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: Pt II,
Interview by Andrew Maerkle.
http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_itv_e/k15N0UpRnFSy6i3caPT9
Lost in the Memory Palace | Experiment in F# Minor