crazy ideas for "Being John Malkovich", Hitchcock's camerawork, and with them I call up the stories of axe-wielding fathers, tyrannical mothers, schizophrenic sons, kidnapped astronauts, and has-been puppeteers. Opera for a Small RoomThus prepared, the third floor is finally able to transport me into the polyphony of a multiple imaginary space. This time, it is not the "impossible" view from above, but the voyeur's sideways peeping through the window of a kind of wooden cabin. It is as if I am in the countryside and I chance upon a house with a peculiar mix of sounds emanating from it. I espy a veritable orchestra of record players and loud speakers, a guitar amplifier, strange knick-knacks, and weirdly constructed wooden shelves, amateurishly installed outflow pipes, two old fleamarket chandeliers, and the moving shadow of a man. My eyes — and above all my ears — take me to the center of the consciousness and fantasy of this protagonist who, in this rural isolation, is imagining the desire-laden metropolitan art of opera. Around the small room — that Cardiff and Miller built as a replica of a room they found in the country studio they purchased some years ago in Canada — a surround-sound system is installed. Out of the loudspeakers comes the full sound of a string orchestra tuning up, plus the throat-clearing and whispering and scraping shoes and rustling clothes of an audience, before a megaphone loudspeaker mounted above the window emits a strangely muttering, deep croak: the voice of the protagonist, who acts as the prompter giving stage directions for his own production. It becomes clear that the scene with the orchestra tuning up and the audience arriving at the major concert venue is only taking place in his imagination — the surround sound, then, could be described as the external representation of his imagination. We are outside the cabin but inside his head at the same time: the "impossible" hearing from within, "Being John Malkovich" as psychoacoustics. In that film, the plot steers inexorably towards an instance of narrative feedback that also recurs in Cardiff and Miller's work: what happens when Malkovich himself discovers the tunnel and crawls inside? Kaufman's answer is narcissistic multiplication ad infinitum — the actor sees only himself, acting all the parts. For Cardiff and Miller, whose shadow man is his own director and leading actor, it is narcissistic multiplication of the sound sources, the orchestra of voices and traditions in his head.He puts a record on the turntable: we hear the needle hit the groove, and we see the pick-up arm on one of the record players lower itself onto the spinning disc. It is McCormack, whose distinctive voice — sung at the time into the recording horn — reaches us not only from another time, but from another world. The man hums along, making a poor job of following the melody, until the record gets stuck. His shadow moves, and I hear him taking the needle off the record (and now I see that this is a prepared recording, not the live sound from the record player). But things are only just getting underway: thunder and rain, the chandeliers and lamps flicker as if there is a disturbance in Excerpt from Jörg Heiser, "The Making Of Imagination," trans. Nicholas Grindell, in Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: The Secret Hotel, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2006. Vorbild für / Source forOpera for a Small Room 2005
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