Lost in the Memory Palace | Road Trip
says "What are you doing, why are you going backwards" and all that, and it's all recorded. Then he starts: "Why is it in this order? This isn't the right order. When you go across Canada you go from here to there and ..."; then me, "I don't know". This whole piece then – when we re-listened to it and replayed the slides in front of it, we realized we had a piece. But it was completely done as a sketch for another piece. We only planned to use a little bit of the audio, but now it's become much more of a piece about relationships as well as a piece about photography and all that.MJH: There's an interesting connection to The Berlin Files, which also uses a slide projector?GBM: We like the idea of how you have this ancient – OK, this very old – technology, of slide projections in the video piece, and I think it sort of inspired us then to do Road Trip, which came after The Berlin Files.JC: This idea that George could be on one speaker and I could be on another speaker and we could create this sort of virtual dialogue – that came out of the Forty Part Motet too – the choir where every speaker is one person, one voice, and that speaker becomes very anthropomorphic. That's something that continues in all of our works, that sense of the anthropomorphization of technology, and even with the little Discman and the headset you get connected to another person somehow, a virtual person. We used the same sense of escape and how sound can create physical presence in Night Canoeing. It's a video projection done by George and I, we were out in the river at night in a canoe, and George was paddling while I recorded it with the video camera and binaural audio microphones, one in each ear, so that out of one speaker you hear paddling and George's voice and on the other you occasionally hear me. You don't know what's going on really because sometimes you just see the mist coming off the water and bits of the shore lit by our big flashlight. It looks a little sinister, like a murder scene.MJH: So you are in it together, and for some years now your works have all been signed Cardiff and Miller?GBM: Not the audio-walks, though. I mean, we still do our individual work. Janet still does the walks in her name. We did one walk as a collaboration because I ended up being more involved with the ideas and scriptwriting. Excerpt from Michael Juul Holm, "Interview" in Michael Juul Holm and Mette Marcus eds. Louisiana Contemporary: Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2006