Networked Music Review — Interview: Cardiff + Miller
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22/02/14 5:34 PM
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Interview: Cardiff + Miller
Tags
Peter
Traub
Tags:
collaboration narrative cinema immersion interview mixed reality
multimedia sound walk
Janet Cardiff:
... Do you remember how we came up with the idea
George?
George Bures Miller:
You were reading Kafka's "In the Penal Colony"
and we started talking about it. Kafka's story seems so relevant to the
strange times we're living through right now. I think we came up with the
title and then started to brainstorm. What about this, what about that...
how would this work, that's stupid, whatever.
Janet:
I think we were also thinking about the prison research we did for
Pandemonium
and how disgusted we have always been about capital
punishment and the idea of democratic governments being involved in
killing and torture.
George:
And of course the Iraq war. But the process was that we both
made drawings of what we conceptualized and then we'd critique each
others drawings and figure out what ideas were interesting which would
then feed into more drawings. Originally we had drawings with solenoids
attached to the arms of the barber chair. And one drawing had a juke
box attached to the main structure that would control the movement with
the choice of the music. But all that stuff changed when we started to
build it and tried to figure out how to get it all to work. That's when the
fun really starts.
Janet:
Your question about aesthetic tensions; I don't really remember
any. If we do have conflict in ideas or response to a piece then we agree
to try it and see if it does work and then we go from there.
George:
We can almost always agree on what makes a work stronger or
weaker. It's funny because we almost never agree on what art we like by
other people...
Janet:
We tend to throw out ideas to each other, working on many levels
at once skipping from the physical elements to the technical to the
conceptual. For example in
Killing Machine
we set up the moving speaker
first with the barber chair inside the metal structure. I recorded some
dialogue voice for it then we played it through the speaker. Neither of us
liked it even though that's what we both thought would work when we
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Networked Music Review — Interview: Cardiff + Miller
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22/02/14 5:34 PM
http://turbulence.org/networked_music_review/2007/09/20/interview...
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were discussing it. Then we played some other sounds and music through
it and I liked some of it but George didn't. Playing it again the next day I
agreed with him. Then George liked some music that we'd used in
another piece and it did seem to push it into the right direction but I
didn't want to use the same music again so in the next days George
found a piece of music on the internet (
Heartstrings
by Freida Abtan) that
seemed to suit the physical aspects of the piece. We both responded
immediately to the music once we put it into the piece. It completely
suited the mechanical nature of the piece but also the mood and pushed
the piece almost into choreography ... a dance work. I guess the pink fun
fur was more me and the mechanical robot aspect was more George but
we both have to be enthusiastic for any element to stay in a piece and
not be cut.
George:
Hmm, I thought the idea for the robot arms was yours and the
pink fun fur was mine.
Janet:
Yeah. You may be right
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Peter Traub, "Interview: Cardiff + Miller,"
Networked_Music_Review,
September 20, 2007.
http://turbulence.org/networked_music_review/2007/09/20/interview-janet-cardiff-and-george-bures-miller/
Lost in the Memory Palace | The Killing Machine