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Dunkerley Dialogue: Supporting New Forms
Transcript
Saturday, April 8, 2006
Dunkerley Dialogue
Supporting New Forms
Janet Cardiff, Artist
George Bures Miller, Artist
John Weber, Director of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College
Conference transcript editing by Sarah Goodwin, Professor of English, Skidmore College; copyediting by Kathryn Gallien.
John Weber: Welcome to the laboratory of perception and welcome to a number of newcomers too. Today, we are starting off with a Dunkerley Dialogue, funded by Skidmore alum Michele Dunkerley, whom we also thank for yesterday’s dialogue with Fred Wilson and Adam Weinberg. We are starting off with a dialogue with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, who are the artists behind the magnificent “Paradise Institute,” which is in our galleries. I know that many of you haven’t had a chance to do it yet, because only 16 at a time can do it and you have to be there on the half hour. I encourage you to do that as you can over the course of the conference. It is worth skipping or very rapidly eating your sandwich to do that, too: it is an experience you will never forget. That exhibition was really centered around the “Paradise Institute.”
In introducing George and Janet today, I just want to mention briefly that one of the reasons for bringing that piece here has to do with the topic of the conference, which is the notion of a teaching museum. One of the classes that I teach, or actually the one class that I am currently teaching here, is about installation and site-specific work, and similar kinds of work. It is the kind of work that is very, very hard to convey in the college classroom. You have to be there, you have to walk into it, it doesn’t reproduce as well as other kinds of flat static pieces do. So the impetus to bring the “Paradise Institute” had a lot to do with the fact that we have a very large Studio Art Department here on campus; we have theater, we have dance, we have a lot of the studio arts. And I had a chance to work with Janet and George twice in the past while in San Francisco and feel that they are making some of the most unique and amazing work that is happening right now, really truly in the world. They have come now from Berlin, and so I wanted to have the opportunity to share that with students and faculty and with people from the region. It is the kind of work that is almost a pilgrimage work that you want to go and see when it is on view. There is also another piece of theirs, a sound piece, very different from the piece that we have here, which is in Philadelphia at the Eastern State Penitentiary, about five blocks from the Philadelphia Museum [of Art]. It is on view for a half a year or so, until November, and it is worth a trip.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have been making work together since 1995. They also do solo works where it is Janet’s work or George’s work. The piece we have in view here was done by them together both working as artists, and it was created for the 2001 Venice Biennale in Italy, where it was the single piece representing Canada. They are from Canada, currently living in Berlin, and since 1995 they have been doing a range of works, which you will see and hear about this morning, that employ a kind of sound called binaural audio. If you have been in the “Paradise Institute,” you’ve experienced it. If you haven’t been in it, you can’t imagine what it is like, so I won’t try to describe it. Their work has also been shown at PS1, MoMA in New York, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, and recently in 2005 an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz [Austria], a piece called “The Secret Hotel.” They are going to talk a little bit about their work and we are going to talk with them. So welcome, welcome.
Janet Cardiff: Thank you, John. As John said, George and I have been together quite a long time. Just to correct one thing: I think our first collaboration was our first date in 19…
George Bures Miller: Wait, you shouldn’t say what year it was.
Janet: Yeah, I won’t say the date, but for some reason George and I went to school together—that’s not for some reason—but he was a painter and I was printmaker. And for some reason when we started collaborating we did films. He was going to go into film school until we did our first feature film in 1985.
George: Right, a Super 8 feature film. It was a nightmare, so I decided not to be a filmmaker.
Janet: And I was adding, you were going out recording and adding sound to things. Then he went to school in Toronto, where we had access to tons of media; that is where we really started to be able to start making moving things. Today we are going to compress a two-hour talk into specific pieces that deal with the conference issues, so if we skim over things you can always ask questions later to fill them out. We might as well just start with the slides. [Slides.]
George: This is a work by me from about 1991; this is called “Conversation Interrogation.” You see the screen when you come in and there is a surveillance camera, and then there is also a sign saying, “Please sit down,” and you sit down in a chair. Then I come on the screen, and in the slide it looks like I am actually looking at the person in the chair, who happens to be Janet, but I am not. I am looking over her right shoulder. Then when I come on, I say, “So what’s your name?” The next shot is of the other person in the cross-cut position looking the other way. I was working as a film editor at this time, and I wanted to do a piece that showed up the conversational motif that they used all the time in the news and films where you see the people, you actually see them talking to each other when you use this crosscut—one person looking this way, cut to the other person looking this way—and we assume that they are talking to each other as long as the line of sight is correct. Using the monitor, I set the line. As long as they are looking at the monitor, the sight lines are always correct, so it gives them the impression that they are within this conversation with me on the screen. What happens is it changes, it is very schizophrenic; it says something like, “It is great to see you again, I haven’t seen you for such a long time,” and then it cuts back to them and they are sitting there looking uncomfortable.
Janet: We want to show this early piece because it helps explain how we started working together; but also how a lot of the work we do tends to throw people, to throw their mind into other spaces. If you are in the “Paradise Institute,” we also do that physically, but it is very much a matter of somehow accessing people’s ability to transport themselves elsewhere through their visualization. It is a very weird experience. Imagine here you are at this schizophrenic experience, as George said, seeing yourself on the screen looking at someone else, but you imagine yourself that you are in some room with this man, so…
George: …so you are within a conversation you know hasn’t taken place. It is destabilizing psychologically and, in a certain way, physically.
Janet: This next one is a piece called “The Dark Pool.” John was referring to this piece as our first major collaboration. I think we decide that a piece is a collaboration if we can’t remember whose idea it was. You can walk around this installation and sound is triggered, and it is all based on an imaginary fantastical place called the Dark Pool. There is a whole narrative set up as people wander around and they get feedback on it. I think we are nightmare artists for museums because, first of all, the set up for this…
George: It’s not that bad.
Janet: He wants to get some more shows.
George: It is very easy to set up.
Janet: But, first of all, sound is always such an issue. We are preparing two major exhibitions in Europe right now. There are all these sound wells that have to be built because this piece is in a room in itself, but it can’t have “Forty-Part Motet” next to it, which is a really loud piece or another new really loud piece, which is an opera. Other pieces require quiet, and other pieces are really loud, so it is tricky.
George: So we are fighting with ourselves with setting up these new exhibitions. I just wanted to explain this piece. As you walk through it, you trigger the sounds. So out of different speakers, you hear different things. There is a speaker there; if you walk up to that you’ll hear counting. I think it is coming out of that speaker—we use counting a lot—I am not sure. And then there are stories coming out of various other speakers as you wander around the space. The sound always changes. There is no linearity to the story; you just get what you get when you walk through, and depending on the way you walk you get a different story than the next person.
Janet: And it is related to something like Borges; he was the inspiration for the piece, but relating to his way of working with fiction and making it truth, which always interests us.
George: We wanted to make a piece that made the viewers feel like they had fallen out of the back of the museum, perhaps—like they just lost it completely.
Janet: Yes. In fact, in Barcelona, where it is going to show, we actually went through one of their structural walls and went behind the wall to where no one would ever see it. The visitors have to walk around there and then they go into a space and they enter this space. It is really great when museums can give us access to hidden spaces. There are places where the public’s senses are heightened, I think, when they are able to enter into places like that.
So now we are going to talk a little bit about the audio walks. This is a technique that I developed in 1991 in a residency and basically, as John says, we recorded with binaural audio. I am recording there in this basement, in the souterrain of a 15th-century villa in the middle of Rome. There are two microphones, one microphone in each ear.
George: When you play it back on headphones, you get an incredibly realistic sense of what was recorded using the head. You can also record using microphones in your own ears, so you become a dummy head, I guess. Because of the way our brain decodes it from one ear to another, it creates an incredible sense of reality.
Janet: And one thing that attracted me to it when I first started working with the technology was how you never know what is real, so you can play also with different levels of time. You use past recorded time and you bring it into the present. But then you screw with people’s understanding by describing things that are in front of them. They know they are listening to a recorded voice, but at the same time I say, for example, “There is a man coming towards you with a suit on and his shirt looks like it is too tight.” And that is in the city, in London, and there are in fact 10 of them coming towards you.
George: How many people have done a walk of Janet’s, just so we know how much we have to explain? Okay, not that many. Basically, you go to a museum or a site, and there will be a desk where you hand in some ID, and they give you now an iPod—or in the old days a tape Walkman, then a CD player, and now iPod. They tell you where to start. You put the headphones on, you go to where you start, Janet’s voice comes on, she starts telling you some story. And then she leads you along a walk through a city. In the Artangel walk it is through the East End of London.
Janet: And we are going to show you a very small example of this on DVD when we get to show the DVDs. In the piece that we will show, I say, “There is a lime green car across from you.” It happened to be that Chrysophylla lived on that street, and he had a lime green car. And so it would be right there, and they would go, “Well how does she know?” We used that in “Paradise Institute” a lot too, this whole idea that you know it’s recorded reality, but then, you are not sure what is real.
George: And there are all kinds of other synchronistic things that happen. Maybe a window is open and Janet comments on that, and so you are always being thrown into this other reality. We often think that it’s a third space. You are listening; the stuff you are hearing we usually recorded right on that site, so you are hearing through the headphones the real audio from that site. It is almost a hyperreality that you enter into, because the two are mixing and you are not absolutely sure of what is the real and what is the recorded. A phantom car will go by and you will look for it, and it won’t be there, because the binaural audio is such a strange thing.
John: And actually there is a book that just came out on the walks called The Walk Book, with a CD that walks you through the book. We have a few copies for sale. When Gary Wilson and Carolyn and I were getting ready to start thinking about the play you saw last night, we were doing that CD. There is a moment where you say, “Go to the window, there is a car going by.” We got up and we went to my window and a car went by, and we just looked at each other and went “Whoooo.”
George: You are supposed to leave your house and walk around the streets, so it is a non-site-specific walk.
Janet: But this is a perfect example, John, of how you can’t describe these things until you walk them. Because when I am recording I record with the head right there, so you hear my breathing, you hear my footsteps, and when you are listening you tend to walk with the footsteps, you tend to have a sympathetic, empathetic relationship with my voice and with my body. You start breathing with my breathing and it is like a cyborg. When you listen to the CD, you don’t really hear that unless you are out walking. With The Walk Book I tried to document all the walks that I have done, and to give an idea of what they are like. You have the book, and then as you are turning the pages I take you around your house. You need to go buy that book. [Laughter]. And at the same time George and I tend to work on different things at once. We’re working on one that uses a telescope. It uses the same idea, in that it is prerecorded video inside, and then the telescope is on a robotic head. First we put a program on that records a camera recording outside a window, and then we record a sequence, and then we put the video from that camera inside the telescope and the telescope follows the camera’s movements. We will show a video excerpt of that also.
George: I am not sure that made any sense at all to anybody but me. It is hard to explain. Again, it is an overlapping of reality. You look through the telescope, and you are seeing a prerecorded image in the telescope that is exactly where the telescope is pointed. The telescope moves, and the image moves in synchronization with it. So in the telescope, you see someone walking by on the street below in the telescope, but they are not out there. You start getting this really strange feeling; you start actually believing. The medium is so strong that our brain starts to believe that what is in the telescope is real, and it starts to wonder, “Why aren’t those people out there?” It is just a weird thing.
Janet: Or else when there is a bus that goes by in reality and someone is standing on the street in the video, your mind starts to think, “Watch out.” It is a very strange effect. Because we found this so interesting, we decided to do some video walks where the person was like the robotic telescope. We prerecorded video, and then we replayed it, and people would sign out little Handycams.
George: We would shoot these using a Steadycam, walking through the space, so what she is seeing on the video here is actually a shot of the space that she is in, but it is a prerecorded shot with the audio recorded in binaural audio. I think, oh yes, this is from the stairway scene, which is…
Janet: …very scary.
George: This is another one of those instances where you fall outside of the museum. They let us use a “staff-only” stairwell. You are following the tracking shot of this—you being the robotic camera. It is really interesting, because a lot of people can do it, but then a lot of people can’t do it. Some people get lost, and some people can just find their way with no problem at all.
Janet: Yes, artists have no problem following an image and knowing how that relates, because probably it’s a perceptual thing. For writers—or curators, sorry—you have got to put in instructions like “Turn left in there.”
George: Someone wrote about these that they are physical cinema, because they become like a cinematic experience. The monitor is only 2.5-inch diameter, and we were surprised by what it can do. But our vision is such a powerful sense that it overwhelms everything and our world—when you are doing a video walk—becomes this little tiny monitor. So we wanted to do more of that. These are a very different experience than the audio walks. We wanted to kind of bring in the audio walk sensation, so sometimes in a video walk we will completely take out the image and just have the sound for two minutes, because we use binaural in the video walk.
Janet: And one of the things that I wanted to mention: this piece was curated by John Weber as at SFMOMA in 2001. They have just remounted it again, and it is part of the collection there.
George: So it is on view; if you go to San Francisco you can see it.
Janet: We had a really big dialogue about how to keep a piece like this in the collection. It was quite interesting, because we had to ask, “Okay, what happens in 10 years when we don’t have video cameras anymore like that one? What if they are little iPods or something like that?” The SFMOMA [San Francisco Museum of Modern Art] was one of the few museums that actually took the responsibility to think ahead and to talk to me and say, “Okay, what is important about this piece? Is it the screen that is important, or is it the camera, is it this lens, is it the sound?” All these sorts of things. There are always going to be little recording devices, but we had to discuss all these issues for them to remount.
George: One of the things that is interesting perceptually—and you talked about this when we were working on it—is that the act of synchronizing your body to your footsteps and the voice and the image creates something that feels almost like a kind of trance that you are in as you move around. It was very striking, the number of comments that we got from people. We didn’t put a comment book out, but within a week of the opening of the show we got people who were wanting to write notes, e-mails—you know, who is this woman, can we talk to her, is she seeing anybody? They want to because there is a feeling of intimacy that the walks create. When people would finish it, we had reports of people almost crying in the elevator at the top floor because they wanted it to keep going on. They also weren’t sure what was real and what wasn’t. Someone would come up to them afterwards, and they thought maybe that was all part of the operation. This was helped by the fact that one of the actors in the piece was also working downstairs. Strangely enough, he went away for four years and now he is back, now that the piece is back there again. The borderline between reality and art remains very permeable in that piece.
Janet: We also wanted to show here the two pieces that were the precursors to the “Paradise Institute.” The first piece was a little piece called “Playhouse,” which was one person at a time for five minutes.
George: This was a nightmare at openings.
Janet: And you put the headphones on outside. We wanted to create a piece that was an installation, but a walk at the same time. You put the headphones on, and it leads you into a space that turns out to be a lounge from a little opera house…
George: But that construction is only about two feet high. You are sitting above it, and actually everything is made of cardboard, even the seats, not even painted, and this is all kind of molded paper. Then there is a Plexiglas screen, and onto that Plexiglas screen we projected our little character of the opera diva. What is she, two inches high or something in the piece?
Janet: No, about four inches, I think.
George: Four inches, okay. You are getting this weird kind of disjunction again, because you are hearing a large space and yet you know you are in this kind of fun little playhouse—which is the title of the work. At some point you lose your bearings and you kind of feel that you are in that space.
Janet: And that is what we did for “Paradise Institute.” We recorded “Paradise Institute” as a real film, with a sound guy with a boom, which was a single mike. After the film was edited, we took it to a big theater. We put the sound through old speakers in the big theater, and then we rerecorded it with the binaural head. It is about sound: we talked about this transporting medium; sound has this ability to take you other places. You hear sound—like horses on a cobblestone road—and you are transported into the past. Or you hear someone running by you and all your senses get alerted. We try to make you feel physically like you really are in a big theater, even though the illusion and of course the physical situation are that it is a tiny one.
George: This next one was called the “Muriel Lake Incident.” Again, we thought, “Oh, we have to do something that can allow more than one person at a time.” We thought, “Now, three, that’s going to be great.”
Janet: This is also about a five-minute piece, and it is also recorded with the binaural audio. Again, it’s playing on the idea of audience and image, so that the two are very separate. The screen goes crazy at the end and there is a gunshot, and there are people running in the theater and things like that, lots of fun stuff. We like fun stuff.
George: This was really the precursor to “Paradise,” because it is a cinema.
Janet: You look in the box and this is what you see.
George: So again, we were having a lot of fun with these pieces. I mean, they are like play in a certain way. For the film with this one, we shot a film with the bad guy—or was that the good guy?—anyway, I am in there with a cowboy hat, and Janet is the dancing woman, and we found some friends to be other characters.
Janet: I just included this next piece because some people may have seen it at MoMA. It just came down, and is part of their collection. It has forty speakers, and it is called “Forty-Part Motet” (2001). It incorporates the music called “Spem in alium” by Thomas Tallis, written in 1575. I wanted to create a piece that was a virtual choir and that would combine a 16th-century piece of music with all this technology.
George: Each speaker is an individual voice in a 40-speaker composition.
Janet: The reason I just put it up is because we have been talking and thinking about sound in museums. With MoMA we had to create a separate alleyway into it and sound panels around it, to get the right toning. If you are working on designing a museum, think about sound. In some museums, you walk in and you think, what were the architects thinking? We just did a huge show in Bregenz, and it is a cement floor—no, cement walls?
George: Yeah, cement walls, terrazzo floors, glass ceiling. It is basically the worst place we can show.
Janet: People can’t even talk in that space because it is so exhausting. You can’t hear anything unless you are standing right next to the person. I think now architects are starting to think a little bit more about acoustics.
George: There is so much more sound work going on. You have to think about that with video as well. You might have four videos in one show, and all the sound overlapping is such a nightmare.
John: For any of you who are working on building projects, college museums—I know there are several out there—this is really an important thing to consider, because the work is going to continue happening. Even dealing with the existing body of work in video and in sound, this was the most terrifying thing for me about this show. I had that piece by Beth Campbell that I wanted to show, and we ended up building a small room for it and putting in a sound-absorbing ceiling. We knew that we had your piece here, and we needed to keep that sound inside the corral just for the other works that were in the show.
Janet: So should we just show two minutes of “The Missing Voice”? Or should we not just show anything?
John: Yes, show us “The Missing Voice,” and then we will open it up to some dialogue and get some questions.
Janet: You can describe this while I turn on the projector.
George: Okay. This piece is again another kind of virtual-person piece. It is called “Feedback.”
Janet: Does everybody know the Jimmy Hendrix version of the “Star-Spangled Banner” from Woodstock? Well, we hired a session guitarist to transcribe the whole thing. First a composer had to transcribe it all musically, and then a session guitarist played it.
George: The Hendrix “Star-Spangled Banner” was his fantastic criticism of the Vietnam War. We wanted to tune into that. We wanted to create a piece that would make it feel as if he were on the stage here and now, as opposed to just a recorded version of it. We had been working with trying to do a guitar piece using an amplifier, where you record the guitar dry into the board and then you play it through a real guitar amplifier. You get a sense of a real guitarist’s presence there. We thought of it almost like a virtual person. You come in, you put your foot on the wall panel, and out of the amplifier comes this incredibly loud rendition. It is not Hendrix, obviously. We couldn’t use a recorded version of the Hendrix because back then in everything that was recorded you would get all the crowd noise, and so you couldn’t get this virtual-person feeling that we got when we recorded it dry. Am I getting too technical?
Janet: Yeah.
George: Anyway, you get a real sense of a real guitarist there.
Janet: We only show this if we have a closet far away we can stick it in.
George: Yeah, it doesn’t get shown a lot because it is unbelievably loud. We had it in our gallery in New York, and the backroom that we put it in was actually right next to the gallery next door. The owner there said, “Oh, I really like that now, actually, after the month and a half I listened to it.” Now, so this one here [“The Missing Voice”] is a walk.
Janet: All the sounds you hear are on the CD player, but there is also the live sound she would be hearing that would be mixing in. It is hard to describe, but you just have to imagine it.
George: The sound quality is not that good here, so you just have to imagine that it sounds pretty great. [Audio piece.]
John: Is that piece actually still available? Can it still be done?
Janet: The library that it started in closed this year, but it can still be accessed from Artangel. In September the Whitechapel Gallery bought the library, and they are having a show in the library space, where they are going to remount this piece. Eventually, I think, it will be there permanently. The piece started in the library, which was going to close in two years, but it ended up being open for five years. That was great for me. The librarians had it out, which was phenomenal. Sometimes, one guy said there, that is all he would do in a day: he wouldn’t hand out any books, he would just hand out these walks.
John: We have about 20 minutes for questions from the audience.
Audience member: What were the most important aspects of that piece, from a technical standpoint?
Janet: A couple of different things. It has to be a certain-size screen and a fairly good quality screen; it has to be a recording device, because people have to feel like they are actually having that sense of recording; and it has to have good stereo audio that can go to whatever headphone. And then it has to be a certain level of audio volume that the people…
George: We have been having a lot of trouble with volume recently because of the people suing the manufacturers of CD players for ear damage. So now with a lot of the disk players we can’t get a high enough volume. When we are doing these things it is very different from rock and roll; you go from very soft parts to very loud parts, so it has been a problem. Luckily, they are programmable in their level of setting; you can program it so your kids can’t listen to it loud, but iPods are actually pretty good right now for our purposes. I am just hoping that they don’t change it.
Janet: This piece is on tape right now on a little device that plays in the camera. Then people have to rewind. The next cameras are already out—they are hard drives—so then it will all be digital. Normally, when we have a piece with the museum, we give them files for their computer to store the piece on the hard drive anyway; so then if the piece changes, if the technology changes, you still have a master on a workable medium.
George: The main thing for us is consultation, because every mix is done for a certain set of headphones. For “Paradise” we use these headphones. They buy them; I think they are still in production because we buy so many of them. But sometimes a museum won’t consult us and they will buy something that the mix wasn’t made for; so mainly we just ask that we be called and be consulted. If we can’t get the headphones we designate, we try and find them for them, or we will test the ones that they can get to make sure everything is working.
Janet: That is the same with a lot of our pieces. We have specific technical people who go set up pieces, and they are really trained. The “Forty-Part Motet” has a tone mixer who is trained musically, and he is also an audio engineer. Every space has to be tuned, so you have got to change the levels and everything for every space.
George: It has taken a while for the museums to understand that the “Forty-Part Motet” has to be tuned to every space that it goes to because every space is acoustically different.
Janet: This space is quite different than the space outside, or the gallery space.
George: They can save the settings for one space, so if they ever reinstall it in exactly the same space they don’t need our tone mixer to go there. But if they decide to put it somewhere else, or if they are loaning it, then they have to have trained people to do that. There are probably five or six people who can set it up in the world.
John: I am curious: could you imagine actually showing one of the video walks, at some point, on a phone that has a camera? You know, they are not quite there yet, but in two years…
Janet: …they are going to be, yeah.
George: I think that is probably what is going to happen with the video walks—as long as there is a camera, because it is about the idea of looking through something that has a camera on it. We were thinking about the new iPods that have video, and it would work on that screen. The screen is good enough and everything, but you don’t get this feeling that you are using something that could have been recorded—you just need to be looking through a camera to get the right experience.
Audience member: Do you know if gamers are looking at your works and appreciating them?
Janet: Not that we know of, but they could be, and they are just not writing “gamer” after their comments.
George: We don’t really know any gamers and we are not gamers at all. That’s an interesting question. I guess gaming is kind of like a virtual playground.
John: It is also immersive. When you are in the “Paradise Institute” you are so engrossed in it, it just takes you over. I am not a gamer either, but I suspect there is something a little bit similar there with this sort of charge.
George: It is the same with books in a way. And that is why it is so hard to actually document. But, Janet, you are interested in scaring people.
Janet: You are right; you are right. If you heighten the senses, then people’s vision is heightened and their sense of audio is heightened, so then their brain is working more, and they get this whole sense of heightened reality.
George: People talk about coming out of a walk situation and feeling like their whole vision is enhanced. We enjoy an immersive fantastic experience as long as it is not too manipulative. We enjoy film, or Disneyland. We are working with film, but trying also to point out the manipulation of the media. We are always pulling the rug out from under ourselves, as well as the people within the pieces; we are making fun of the bad film or…
Janet: Like in the “Paradise Institute,” there is a scene with the nurse who is going towards the patient and kissing him and stuff like that, and then somebody in the audience says, “That’s excellent nursing.” That totally takes the seriousness of the scene away. People have asked, “Why do you do that? You are destroying your own work.” It’s because we want to make people aware that it’s fiction. I guess we are in a postmodern age, and we started making work in the ’80s; I’m not sure why. It is about philosophy, it is about perception, it is about how we know reality only through our senses.
George: When you come out of the piece, you might think to yourself, “I have not been paying enough attention.” We go on autopilot in terms of our ears, and we are a little more aware of what our eyes are doing to us. One of the things that your work reveals is how much we know about the world through our ears that we don’t pay attention to; we focus on the figure and we don’t notice the ground. In “Paradise Institute” there is this stuff coming around you and the narrative position changes; at certain points the story is there, and then all of a sudden we are in the middle of it, and the scary guy is behind us and says, “You thought you were pretty smart,” and it is weird. So you come out of that realizing, “I have not been noticing what my ears are telling me about the world.” You are surprising people. People are always going, “What is this?”
Janet: Something very interesting is that one of our first curators in New York was deaf in one ear, and he heard the “Walk Munster” and invited us into the gallery. And there have been several more—a patron who produced The Walk Book, who is also deaf in one ear, and another curator, Kitty, who is almost deaf. I asked—I wanted to know—“Why do you like this work? You know we are all audio.” They said it is because “I feel the vibration in one ear, and then I can turn the headphone around and I get much more sense of what it is to have 3D listening quality.”
Audience member: Who speaks Janet’s parts in the versions shown abroad?
George: We hire an actress to be Janet.
Janet: Yeah, we have several pieces, one in Italy, and in Germany—we are doing a piece right now that is in the former East Germany, where not many people speak English. We found different people who sort of sound like me and can actually do the voice like me. We basically do the whole English version first. Then we have to keep my voice separate from the audio track. It is a technical problem we have to deal with. “Munster” was also a case where there was a German version and an English version. First language goes in your head in a way that second language doesn’t, so it is very important for us to have that sense of words coming in and being thoughts, rather than translating words all the time.
When we are on a site basically we go there for three days. Usually at the beginning we go there for one day first to see if the site is interesting. What people think is interesting and what we think is interesting are completely different. We need a site that is diverse. A lot of modern museums are not interesting to us unless you can go into the basement area or go into some other different space, because space affects people so physically. We like a big space, small spaces, narrow alleys, you know, big Liverpool Station, that sort of thing; and then basically George mostly figures out the route, because I am really bad with space. We both wander around and figure out a route that won’t kill people, where people won’t fall down stairs and get run over by cars, and that is interesting. It has to be no more than about—well, the Central Park walk ended up being a 40-minute walk, and then we left them at the end and then they had 10 minutes to walk back, so it ends up being an hour’s walk. We have to think about how long it takes, but the time period is very much like a drawing; it is about texture, we want different effects on the feet, so you have gravel, and then you have this and this, and there are a lot of considerations that come into it.
Audience member: How do your pieces challenge and change the museums that show them?
Janet: Well, I would say, one way they challenge the museum is that it actually has to hire someone to hand the pieces out.
George: So they have to interface with the people in a different way than they are used to.
Janet: So that is part of your budget.
George: Because part of the work, part of the actual piece, is the people sitting there handing it out and how they interact with the public. If you have someone who doesn’t care and is just sitting there acting like, “Yeah, whatever, take this piece,” it affects the way it is perceived and it affects how many people will do it. Usually we try to get them enthusiastic about it. We get them to do it, and if they like the work then they can work on the booth.
Janet: How it changes the museum, I am not sure.
George: Yes, that’s a tough question.
Janet: At SFMOMA, it was because we took them into a stairwell that is only used by staff. Maybe the SFMOMA is a good example, again, of an audio walk. Every piece has those considerations with technology involved, but the SFMOMA knew they were going to be changing the whole foyer entrance to the museum, so they told us about that. When you actually look through the camera you can see that there used to be boundaries here, boundaries there, and the desk used to be over there. We find that’s an interesting layering of time. It adds whole new content to the piece. And then every person that’s walking through the piece will get a different experience. In London, in “The Missing Voice” piece, they actually changed the crosswalk from over here to over there and that was a little bit more difficult; that’s too big a change.
George: Yes, we will try and rerecord that, actually.
Janet: It always comes down to museums: it takes people who are looking ahead into the future to be able to say, “We need this piece in the collection; we can deal with the problems.” When we didn’t have quite the name we have now, there were pieces that should have been collected and that weren’t, because the people on the board of trustees were only thinking, “This piece can never be resold; it’s only the site,” just stuff like that. I think it is all about the people in the museum.
George: “Paradise Institute” is another example. This piece that is here was bought by the Corcoran [Gallery] in Washington. They gave us a questionnaire asking all kinds of things they need to think about for the future. I mean, the wallpaper is eventually going to wear out, how are they going to replace that; the carpeting; how close do they have to stick to the colors of everything. Now, even five years later, you probably can’t get the same carpet, so it is a decorating issue. That’s all going to have to be kept up in a certain way. They can match colors; they can conserve the actual model in a traditional way.
John: Yeah, I think you have to make certain assumptions: there will be moving images in the future; it will be possible to make them in different sizes; exactly what the technology is we are not quite sure, but they are probably not going to go away. In the case of the SFMOMA piece, the script is tied very tightly to the central core architecture of the building. That was a decision that Janet and George made when they were thinking about it, such that it could be collectable. It relied on putting up one painting from the permanent collection that was actually in the piece. The other parts of it were really things that could change over time, and the script accounted for that in ways that would mean that the experience the audience was having of the building could undergo a certain amount of evolution and change, but the integrity of the piece would remain.
Okay, we started a bit late here, so we are going to break for five minutes and then come on back. Thank you. Janet and George will be there this evening for the reception, so you will have another chance during the reception tonight to talk.
Dunkerley Dialogue
Supporting New Forms
Janet Cardiff, Artist
George Bures Miller, Artist
John Weber, Director of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College
Conference transcript editing by Sarah Goodwin, Professor of English, Skidmore College; copyediting by Kathryn Gallien.
John Weber: Welcome to the laboratory of perception and welcome to a number of newcomers too. Today, we are starting off with a Dunkerley Dialogue, funded by Skidmore alum Michele Dunkerley, whom we also thank for yesterday’s dialogue with Fred Wilson and Adam Weinberg. We are starting off with a dialogue with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, who are the artists behind the magnificent “Paradise Institute,” which is in our galleries. I know that many of you haven’t had a chance to do it yet, because only 16 at a time can do it and you have to be there on the half hour. I encourage you to do that as you can over the course of the conference. It is worth skipping or very rapidly eating your sandwich to do that, too: it is an experience you will never forget. That exhibition was really centered around the “Paradise Institute.”
In introducing George and Janet today, I just want to mention briefly that one of the reasons for bringing that piece here has to do with the topic of the conference, which is the notion of a teaching museum. One of the classes that I teach, or actually the one class that I am currently teaching here, is about installation and site-specific work, and similar kinds of work. It is the kind of work that is very, very hard to convey in the college classroom. You have to be there, you have to walk into it, it doesn’t reproduce as well as other kinds of flat static pieces do. So the impetus to bring the “Paradise Institute” had a lot to do with the fact that we have a very large Studio Art Department here on campus; we have theater, we have dance, we have a lot of the studio arts. And I had a chance to work with Janet and George twice in the past while in San Francisco and feel that they are making some of the most unique and amazing work that is happening right now, really truly in the world. They have come now from Berlin, and so I wanted to have the opportunity to share that with students and faculty and with people from the region. It is the kind of work that is almost a pilgrimage work that you want to go and see when it is on view. There is also another piece of theirs, a sound piece, very different from the piece that we have here, which is in Philadelphia at the Eastern State Penitentiary, about five blocks from the Philadelphia Museum [of Art]. It is on view for a half a year or so, until November, and it is worth a trip.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have been making work together since 1995. They also do solo works where it is Janet’s work or George’s work. The piece we have in view here was done by them together both working as artists, and it was created for the 2001 Venice Biennale in Italy, where it was the single piece representing Canada. They are from Canada, currently living in Berlin, and since 1995 they have been doing a range of works, which you will see and hear about this morning, that employ a kind of sound called binaural audio. If you have been in the “Paradise Institute,” you’ve experienced it. If you haven’t been in it, you can’t imagine what it is like, so I won’t try to describe it. Their work has also been shown at PS1, MoMA in New York, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, and recently in 2005 an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz [Austria], a piece called “The Secret Hotel.” They are going to talk a little bit about their work and we are going to talk with them. So welcome, welcome.
Janet Cardiff: Thank you, John. As John said, George and I have been together quite a long time. Just to correct one thing: I think our first collaboration was our first date in 19…
George Bures Miller: Wait, you shouldn’t say what year it was.
Janet: Yeah, I won’t say the date, but for some reason George and I went to school together—that’s not for some reason—but he was a painter and I was printmaker. And for some reason when we started collaborating we did films. He was going to go into film school until we did our first feature film in 1985.
George: Right, a Super 8 feature film. It was a nightmare, so I decided not to be a filmmaker.
Janet: And I was adding, you were going out recording and adding sound to things. Then he went to school in Toronto, where we had access to tons of media; that is where we really started to be able to start making moving things. Today we are going to compress a two-hour talk into specific pieces that deal with the conference issues, so if we skim over things you can always ask questions later to fill them out. We might as well just start with the slides. [Slides.]
George: This is a work by me from about 1991; this is called “Conversation Interrogation.” You see the screen when you come in and there is a surveillance camera, and then there is also a sign saying, “Please sit down,” and you sit down in a chair. Then I come on the screen, and in the slide it looks like I am actually looking at the person in the chair, who happens to be Janet, but I am not. I am looking over her right shoulder. Then when I come on, I say, “So what’s your name?” The next shot is of the other person in the cross-cut position looking the other way. I was working as a film editor at this time, and I wanted to do a piece that showed up the conversational motif that they used all the time in the news and films where you see the people, you actually see them talking to each other when you use this crosscut—one person looking this way, cut to the other person looking this way—and we assume that they are talking to each other as long as the line of sight is correct. Using the monitor, I set the line. As long as they are looking at the monitor, the sight lines are always correct, so it gives them the impression that they are within this conversation with me on the screen. What happens is it changes, it is very schizophrenic; it says something like, “It is great to see you again, I haven’t seen you for such a long time,” and then it cuts back to them and they are sitting there looking uncomfortable.
Janet: We want to show this early piece because it helps explain how we started working together; but also how a lot of the work we do tends to throw people, to throw their mind into other spaces. If you are in the “Paradise Institute,” we also do that physically, but it is very much a matter of somehow accessing people’s ability to transport themselves elsewhere through their visualization. It is a very weird experience. Imagine here you are at this schizophrenic experience, as George said, seeing yourself on the screen looking at someone else, but you imagine yourself that you are in some room with this man, so…
George: …so you are within a conversation you know hasn’t taken place. It is destabilizing psychologically and, in a certain way, physically.
Janet: This next one is a piece called “The Dark Pool.” John was referring to this piece as our first major collaboration. I think we decide that a piece is a collaboration if we can’t remember whose idea it was. You can walk around this installation and sound is triggered, and it is all based on an imaginary fantastical place called the Dark Pool. There is a whole narrative set up as people wander around and they get feedback on it. I think we are nightmare artists for museums because, first of all, the set up for this…
George: It’s not that bad.
Janet: He wants to get some more shows.
George: It is very easy to set up.
Janet: But, first of all, sound is always such an issue. We are preparing two major exhibitions in Europe right now. There are all these sound wells that have to be built because this piece is in a room in itself, but it can’t have “Forty-Part Motet” next to it, which is a really loud piece or another new really loud piece, which is an opera. Other pieces require quiet, and other pieces are really loud, so it is tricky.
George: So we are fighting with ourselves with setting up these new exhibitions. I just wanted to explain this piece. As you walk through it, you trigger the sounds. So out of different speakers, you hear different things. There is a speaker there; if you walk up to that you’ll hear counting. I think it is coming out of that speaker—we use counting a lot—I am not sure. And then there are stories coming out of various other speakers as you wander around the space. The sound always changes. There is no linearity to the story; you just get what you get when you walk through, and depending on the way you walk you get a different story than the next person.
Janet: And it is related to something like Borges; he was the inspiration for the piece, but relating to his way of working with fiction and making it truth, which always interests us.
George: We wanted to make a piece that made the viewers feel like they had fallen out of the back of the museum, perhaps—like they just lost it completely.
Janet: Yes. In fact, in Barcelona, where it is going to show, we actually went through one of their structural walls and went behind the wall to where no one would ever see it. The visitors have to walk around there and then they go into a space and they enter this space. It is really great when museums can give us access to hidden spaces. There are places where the public’s senses are heightened, I think, when they are able to enter into places like that.
So now we are going to talk a little bit about the audio walks. This is a technique that I developed in 1991 in a residency and basically, as John says, we recorded with binaural audio. I am recording there in this basement, in the souterrain of a 15th-century villa in the middle of Rome. There are two microphones, one microphone in each ear.
George: When you play it back on headphones, you get an incredibly realistic sense of what was recorded using the head. You can also record using microphones in your own ears, so you become a dummy head, I guess. Because of the way our brain decodes it from one ear to another, it creates an incredible sense of reality.
Janet: And one thing that attracted me to it when I first started working with the technology was how you never know what is real, so you can play also with different levels of time. You use past recorded time and you bring it into the present. But then you screw with people’s understanding by describing things that are in front of them. They know they are listening to a recorded voice, but at the same time I say, for example, “There is a man coming towards you with a suit on and his shirt looks like it is too tight.” And that is in the city, in London, and there are in fact 10 of them coming towards you.
George: How many people have done a walk of Janet’s, just so we know how much we have to explain? Okay, not that many. Basically, you go to a museum or a site, and there will be a desk where you hand in some ID, and they give you now an iPod—or in the old days a tape Walkman, then a CD player, and now iPod. They tell you where to start. You put the headphones on, you go to where you start, Janet’s voice comes on, she starts telling you some story. And then she leads you along a walk through a city. In the Artangel walk it is through the East End of London.
Janet: And we are going to show you a very small example of this on DVD when we get to show the DVDs. In the piece that we will show, I say, “There is a lime green car across from you.” It happened to be that Chrysophylla lived on that street, and he had a lime green car. And so it would be right there, and they would go, “Well how does she know?” We used that in “Paradise Institute” a lot too, this whole idea that you know it’s recorded reality, but then, you are not sure what is real.
George: And there are all kinds of other synchronistic things that happen. Maybe a window is open and Janet comments on that, and so you are always being thrown into this other reality. We often think that it’s a third space. You are listening; the stuff you are hearing we usually recorded right on that site, so you are hearing through the headphones the real audio from that site. It is almost a hyperreality that you enter into, because the two are mixing and you are not absolutely sure of what is the real and what is the recorded. A phantom car will go by and you will look for it, and it won’t be there, because the binaural audio is such a strange thing.
John: And actually there is a book that just came out on the walks called The Walk Book, with a CD that walks you through the book. We have a few copies for sale. When Gary Wilson and Carolyn and I were getting ready to start thinking about the play you saw last night, we were doing that CD. There is a moment where you say, “Go to the window, there is a car going by.” We got up and we went to my window and a car went by, and we just looked at each other and went “Whoooo.”
George: You are supposed to leave your house and walk around the streets, so it is a non-site-specific walk.
Janet: But this is a perfect example, John, of how you can’t describe these things until you walk them. Because when I am recording I record with the head right there, so you hear my breathing, you hear my footsteps, and when you are listening you tend to walk with the footsteps, you tend to have a sympathetic, empathetic relationship with my voice and with my body. You start breathing with my breathing and it is like a cyborg. When you listen to the CD, you don’t really hear that unless you are out walking. With The Walk Book I tried to document all the walks that I have done, and to give an idea of what they are like. You have the book, and then as you are turning the pages I take you around your house. You need to go buy that book. [Laughter]. And at the same time George and I tend to work on different things at once. We’re working on one that uses a telescope. It uses the same idea, in that it is prerecorded video inside, and then the telescope is on a robotic head. First we put a program on that records a camera recording outside a window, and then we record a sequence, and then we put the video from that camera inside the telescope and the telescope follows the camera’s movements. We will show a video excerpt of that also.
George: I am not sure that made any sense at all to anybody but me. It is hard to explain. Again, it is an overlapping of reality. You look through the telescope, and you are seeing a prerecorded image in the telescope that is exactly where the telescope is pointed. The telescope moves, and the image moves in synchronization with it. So in the telescope, you see someone walking by on the street below in the telescope, but they are not out there. You start getting this really strange feeling; you start actually believing. The medium is so strong that our brain starts to believe that what is in the telescope is real, and it starts to wonder, “Why aren’t those people out there?” It is just a weird thing.
Janet: Or else when there is a bus that goes by in reality and someone is standing on the street in the video, your mind starts to think, “Watch out.” It is a very strange effect. Because we found this so interesting, we decided to do some video walks where the person was like the robotic telescope. We prerecorded video, and then we replayed it, and people would sign out little Handycams.
George: We would shoot these using a Steadycam, walking through the space, so what she is seeing on the video here is actually a shot of the space that she is in, but it is a prerecorded shot with the audio recorded in binaural audio. I think, oh yes, this is from the stairway scene, which is…
Janet: …very scary.
George: This is another one of those instances where you fall outside of the museum. They let us use a “staff-only” stairwell. You are following the tracking shot of this—you being the robotic camera. It is really interesting, because a lot of people can do it, but then a lot of people can’t do it. Some people get lost, and some people can just find their way with no problem at all.
Janet: Yes, artists have no problem following an image and knowing how that relates, because probably it’s a perceptual thing. For writers—or curators, sorry—you have got to put in instructions like “Turn left in there.”
George: Someone wrote about these that they are physical cinema, because they become like a cinematic experience. The monitor is only 2.5-inch diameter, and we were surprised by what it can do. But our vision is such a powerful sense that it overwhelms everything and our world—when you are doing a video walk—becomes this little tiny monitor. So we wanted to do more of that. These are a very different experience than the audio walks. We wanted to kind of bring in the audio walk sensation, so sometimes in a video walk we will completely take out the image and just have the sound for two minutes, because we use binaural in the video walk.
Janet: And one of the things that I wanted to mention: this piece was curated by John Weber as at SFMOMA in 2001. They have just remounted it again, and it is part of the collection there.
George: So it is on view; if you go to San Francisco you can see it.
Janet: We had a really big dialogue about how to keep a piece like this in the collection. It was quite interesting, because we had to ask, “Okay, what happens in 10 years when we don’t have video cameras anymore like that one? What if they are little iPods or something like that?” The SFMOMA [San Francisco Museum of Modern Art] was one of the few museums that actually took the responsibility to think ahead and to talk to me and say, “Okay, what is important about this piece? Is it the screen that is important, or is it the camera, is it this lens, is it the sound?” All these sorts of things. There are always going to be little recording devices, but we had to discuss all these issues for them to remount.
George: One of the things that is interesting perceptually—and you talked about this when we were working on it—is that the act of synchronizing your body to your footsteps and the voice and the image creates something that feels almost like a kind of trance that you are in as you move around. It was very striking, the number of comments that we got from people. We didn’t put a comment book out, but within a week of the opening of the show we got people who were wanting to write notes, e-mails—you know, who is this woman, can we talk to her, is she seeing anybody? They want to because there is a feeling of intimacy that the walks create. When people would finish it, we had reports of people almost crying in the elevator at the top floor because they wanted it to keep going on. They also weren’t sure what was real and what wasn’t. Someone would come up to them afterwards, and they thought maybe that was all part of the operation. This was helped by the fact that one of the actors in the piece was also working downstairs. Strangely enough, he went away for four years and now he is back, now that the piece is back there again. The borderline between reality and art remains very permeable in that piece.
Janet: We also wanted to show here the two pieces that were the precursors to the “Paradise Institute.” The first piece was a little piece called “Playhouse,” which was one person at a time for five minutes.
George: This was a nightmare at openings.
Janet: And you put the headphones on outside. We wanted to create a piece that was an installation, but a walk at the same time. You put the headphones on, and it leads you into a space that turns out to be a lounge from a little opera house…
George: But that construction is only about two feet high. You are sitting above it, and actually everything is made of cardboard, even the seats, not even painted, and this is all kind of molded paper. Then there is a Plexiglas screen, and onto that Plexiglas screen we projected our little character of the opera diva. What is she, two inches high or something in the piece?
Janet: No, about four inches, I think.
George: Four inches, okay. You are getting this weird kind of disjunction again, because you are hearing a large space and yet you know you are in this kind of fun little playhouse—which is the title of the work. At some point you lose your bearings and you kind of feel that you are in that space.
Janet: And that is what we did for “Paradise Institute.” We recorded “Paradise Institute” as a real film, with a sound guy with a boom, which was a single mike. After the film was edited, we took it to a big theater. We put the sound through old speakers in the big theater, and then we rerecorded it with the binaural head. It is about sound: we talked about this transporting medium; sound has this ability to take you other places. You hear sound—like horses on a cobblestone road—and you are transported into the past. Or you hear someone running by you and all your senses get alerted. We try to make you feel physically like you really are in a big theater, even though the illusion and of course the physical situation are that it is a tiny one.
George: This next one was called the “Muriel Lake Incident.” Again, we thought, “Oh, we have to do something that can allow more than one person at a time.” We thought, “Now, three, that’s going to be great.”
Janet: This is also about a five-minute piece, and it is also recorded with the binaural audio. Again, it’s playing on the idea of audience and image, so that the two are very separate. The screen goes crazy at the end and there is a gunshot, and there are people running in the theater and things like that, lots of fun stuff. We like fun stuff.
George: This was really the precursor to “Paradise,” because it is a cinema.
Janet: You look in the box and this is what you see.
George: So again, we were having a lot of fun with these pieces. I mean, they are like play in a certain way. For the film with this one, we shot a film with the bad guy—or was that the good guy?—anyway, I am in there with a cowboy hat, and Janet is the dancing woman, and we found some friends to be other characters.
Janet: I just included this next piece because some people may have seen it at MoMA. It just came down, and is part of their collection. It has forty speakers, and it is called “Forty-Part Motet” (2001). It incorporates the music called “Spem in alium” by Thomas Tallis, written in 1575. I wanted to create a piece that was a virtual choir and that would combine a 16th-century piece of music with all this technology.
George: Each speaker is an individual voice in a 40-speaker composition.
Janet: The reason I just put it up is because we have been talking and thinking about sound in museums. With MoMA we had to create a separate alleyway into it and sound panels around it, to get the right toning. If you are working on designing a museum, think about sound. In some museums, you walk in and you think, what were the architects thinking? We just did a huge show in Bregenz, and it is a cement floor—no, cement walls?
George: Yeah, cement walls, terrazzo floors, glass ceiling. It is basically the worst place we can show.
Janet: People can’t even talk in that space because it is so exhausting. You can’t hear anything unless you are standing right next to the person. I think now architects are starting to think a little bit more about acoustics.
George: There is so much more sound work going on. You have to think about that with video as well. You might have four videos in one show, and all the sound overlapping is such a nightmare.
John: For any of you who are working on building projects, college museums—I know there are several out there—this is really an important thing to consider, because the work is going to continue happening. Even dealing with the existing body of work in video and in sound, this was the most terrifying thing for me about this show. I had that piece by Beth Campbell that I wanted to show, and we ended up building a small room for it and putting in a sound-absorbing ceiling. We knew that we had your piece here, and we needed to keep that sound inside the corral just for the other works that were in the show.
Janet: So should we just show two minutes of “The Missing Voice”? Or should we not just show anything?
John: Yes, show us “The Missing Voice,” and then we will open it up to some dialogue and get some questions.
Janet: You can describe this while I turn on the projector.
George: Okay. This piece is again another kind of virtual-person piece. It is called “Feedback.”
Janet: Does everybody know the Jimmy Hendrix version of the “Star-Spangled Banner” from Woodstock? Well, we hired a session guitarist to transcribe the whole thing. First a composer had to transcribe it all musically, and then a session guitarist played it.
George: The Hendrix “Star-Spangled Banner” was his fantastic criticism of the Vietnam War. We wanted to tune into that. We wanted to create a piece that would make it feel as if he were on the stage here and now, as opposed to just a recorded version of it. We had been working with trying to do a guitar piece using an amplifier, where you record the guitar dry into the board and then you play it through a real guitar amplifier. You get a sense of a real guitarist’s presence there. We thought of it almost like a virtual person. You come in, you put your foot on the wall panel, and out of the amplifier comes this incredibly loud rendition. It is not Hendrix, obviously. We couldn’t use a recorded version of the Hendrix because back then in everything that was recorded you would get all the crowd noise, and so you couldn’t get this virtual-person feeling that we got when we recorded it dry. Am I getting too technical?
Janet: Yeah.
George: Anyway, you get a real sense of a real guitarist there.
Janet: We only show this if we have a closet far away we can stick it in.
George: Yeah, it doesn’t get shown a lot because it is unbelievably loud. We had it in our gallery in New York, and the backroom that we put it in was actually right next to the gallery next door. The owner there said, “Oh, I really like that now, actually, after the month and a half I listened to it.” Now, so this one here [“The Missing Voice”] is a walk.
Janet: All the sounds you hear are on the CD player, but there is also the live sound she would be hearing that would be mixing in. It is hard to describe, but you just have to imagine it.
George: The sound quality is not that good here, so you just have to imagine that it sounds pretty great. [Audio piece.]
John: Is that piece actually still available? Can it still be done?
Janet: The library that it started in closed this year, but it can still be accessed from Artangel. In September the Whitechapel Gallery bought the library, and they are having a show in the library space, where they are going to remount this piece. Eventually, I think, it will be there permanently. The piece started in the library, which was going to close in two years, but it ended up being open for five years. That was great for me. The librarians had it out, which was phenomenal. Sometimes, one guy said there, that is all he would do in a day: he wouldn’t hand out any books, he would just hand out these walks.
John: We have about 20 minutes for questions from the audience.
Audience member: What were the most important aspects of that piece, from a technical standpoint?
Janet: A couple of different things. It has to be a certain-size screen and a fairly good quality screen; it has to be a recording device, because people have to feel like they are actually having that sense of recording; and it has to have good stereo audio that can go to whatever headphone. And then it has to be a certain level of audio volume that the people…
George: We have been having a lot of trouble with volume recently because of the people suing the manufacturers of CD players for ear damage. So now with a lot of the disk players we can’t get a high enough volume. When we are doing these things it is very different from rock and roll; you go from very soft parts to very loud parts, so it has been a problem. Luckily, they are programmable in their level of setting; you can program it so your kids can’t listen to it loud, but iPods are actually pretty good right now for our purposes. I am just hoping that they don’t change it.
Janet: This piece is on tape right now on a little device that plays in the camera. Then people have to rewind. The next cameras are already out—they are hard drives—so then it will all be digital. Normally, when we have a piece with the museum, we give them files for their computer to store the piece on the hard drive anyway; so then if the piece changes, if the technology changes, you still have a master on a workable medium.
George: The main thing for us is consultation, because every mix is done for a certain set of headphones. For “Paradise” we use these headphones. They buy them; I think they are still in production because we buy so many of them. But sometimes a museum won’t consult us and they will buy something that the mix wasn’t made for; so mainly we just ask that we be called and be consulted. If we can’t get the headphones we designate, we try and find them for them, or we will test the ones that they can get to make sure everything is working.
Janet: That is the same with a lot of our pieces. We have specific technical people who go set up pieces, and they are really trained. The “Forty-Part Motet” has a tone mixer who is trained musically, and he is also an audio engineer. Every space has to be tuned, so you have got to change the levels and everything for every space.
George: It has taken a while for the museums to understand that the “Forty-Part Motet” has to be tuned to every space that it goes to because every space is acoustically different.
Janet: This space is quite different than the space outside, or the gallery space.
George: They can save the settings for one space, so if they ever reinstall it in exactly the same space they don’t need our tone mixer to go there. But if they decide to put it somewhere else, or if they are loaning it, then they have to have trained people to do that. There are probably five or six people who can set it up in the world.
John: I am curious: could you imagine actually showing one of the video walks, at some point, on a phone that has a camera? You know, they are not quite there yet, but in two years…
Janet: …they are going to be, yeah.
George: I think that is probably what is going to happen with the video walks—as long as there is a camera, because it is about the idea of looking through something that has a camera on it. We were thinking about the new iPods that have video, and it would work on that screen. The screen is good enough and everything, but you don’t get this feeling that you are using something that could have been recorded—you just need to be looking through a camera to get the right experience.
Audience member: Do you know if gamers are looking at your works and appreciating them?
Janet: Not that we know of, but they could be, and they are just not writing “gamer” after their comments.
George: We don’t really know any gamers and we are not gamers at all. That’s an interesting question. I guess gaming is kind of like a virtual playground.
John: It is also immersive. When you are in the “Paradise Institute” you are so engrossed in it, it just takes you over. I am not a gamer either, but I suspect there is something a little bit similar there with this sort of charge.
George: It is the same with books in a way. And that is why it is so hard to actually document. But, Janet, you are interested in scaring people.
Janet: You are right; you are right. If you heighten the senses, then people’s vision is heightened and their sense of audio is heightened, so then their brain is working more, and they get this whole sense of heightened reality.
George: People talk about coming out of a walk situation and feeling like their whole vision is enhanced. We enjoy an immersive fantastic experience as long as it is not too manipulative. We enjoy film, or Disneyland. We are working with film, but trying also to point out the manipulation of the media. We are always pulling the rug out from under ourselves, as well as the people within the pieces; we are making fun of the bad film or…
Janet: Like in the “Paradise Institute,” there is a scene with the nurse who is going towards the patient and kissing him and stuff like that, and then somebody in the audience says, “That’s excellent nursing.” That totally takes the seriousness of the scene away. People have asked, “Why do you do that? You are destroying your own work.” It’s because we want to make people aware that it’s fiction. I guess we are in a postmodern age, and we started making work in the ’80s; I’m not sure why. It is about philosophy, it is about perception, it is about how we know reality only through our senses.
George: When you come out of the piece, you might think to yourself, “I have not been paying enough attention.” We go on autopilot in terms of our ears, and we are a little more aware of what our eyes are doing to us. One of the things that your work reveals is how much we know about the world through our ears that we don’t pay attention to; we focus on the figure and we don’t notice the ground. In “Paradise Institute” there is this stuff coming around you and the narrative position changes; at certain points the story is there, and then all of a sudden we are in the middle of it, and the scary guy is behind us and says, “You thought you were pretty smart,” and it is weird. So you come out of that realizing, “I have not been noticing what my ears are telling me about the world.” You are surprising people. People are always going, “What is this?”
Janet: Something very interesting is that one of our first curators in New York was deaf in one ear, and he heard the “Walk Munster” and invited us into the gallery. And there have been several more—a patron who produced The Walk Book, who is also deaf in one ear, and another curator, Kitty, who is almost deaf. I asked—I wanted to know—“Why do you like this work? You know we are all audio.” They said it is because “I feel the vibration in one ear, and then I can turn the headphone around and I get much more sense of what it is to have 3D listening quality.”
Audience member: Who speaks Janet’s parts in the versions shown abroad?
George: We hire an actress to be Janet.
Janet: Yeah, we have several pieces, one in Italy, and in Germany—we are doing a piece right now that is in the former East Germany, where not many people speak English. We found different people who sort of sound like me and can actually do the voice like me. We basically do the whole English version first. Then we have to keep my voice separate from the audio track. It is a technical problem we have to deal with. “Munster” was also a case where there was a German version and an English version. First language goes in your head in a way that second language doesn’t, so it is very important for us to have that sense of words coming in and being thoughts, rather than translating words all the time.
When we are on a site basically we go there for three days. Usually at the beginning we go there for one day first to see if the site is interesting. What people think is interesting and what we think is interesting are completely different. We need a site that is diverse. A lot of modern museums are not interesting to us unless you can go into the basement area or go into some other different space, because space affects people so physically. We like a big space, small spaces, narrow alleys, you know, big Liverpool Station, that sort of thing; and then basically George mostly figures out the route, because I am really bad with space. We both wander around and figure out a route that won’t kill people, where people won’t fall down stairs and get run over by cars, and that is interesting. It has to be no more than about—well, the Central Park walk ended up being a 40-minute walk, and then we left them at the end and then they had 10 minutes to walk back, so it ends up being an hour’s walk. We have to think about how long it takes, but the time period is very much like a drawing; it is about texture, we want different effects on the feet, so you have gravel, and then you have this and this, and there are a lot of considerations that come into it.
Audience member: How do your pieces challenge and change the museums that show them?
Janet: Well, I would say, one way they challenge the museum is that it actually has to hire someone to hand the pieces out.
George: So they have to interface with the people in a different way than they are used to.
Janet: So that is part of your budget.
George: Because part of the work, part of the actual piece, is the people sitting there handing it out and how they interact with the public. If you have someone who doesn’t care and is just sitting there acting like, “Yeah, whatever, take this piece,” it affects the way it is perceived and it affects how many people will do it. Usually we try to get them enthusiastic about it. We get them to do it, and if they like the work then they can work on the booth.
Janet: How it changes the museum, I am not sure.
George: Yes, that’s a tough question.
Janet: At SFMOMA, it was because we took them into a stairwell that is only used by staff. Maybe the SFMOMA is a good example, again, of an audio walk. Every piece has those considerations with technology involved, but the SFMOMA knew they were going to be changing the whole foyer entrance to the museum, so they told us about that. When you actually look through the camera you can see that there used to be boundaries here, boundaries there, and the desk used to be over there. We find that’s an interesting layering of time. It adds whole new content to the piece. And then every person that’s walking through the piece will get a different experience. In London, in “The Missing Voice” piece, they actually changed the crosswalk from over here to over there and that was a little bit more difficult; that’s too big a change.
George: Yes, we will try and rerecord that, actually.
Janet: It always comes down to museums: it takes people who are looking ahead into the future to be able to say, “We need this piece in the collection; we can deal with the problems.” When we didn’t have quite the name we have now, there were pieces that should have been collected and that weren’t, because the people on the board of trustees were only thinking, “This piece can never be resold; it’s only the site,” just stuff like that. I think it is all about the people in the museum.
George: “Paradise Institute” is another example. This piece that is here was bought by the Corcoran [Gallery] in Washington. They gave us a questionnaire asking all kinds of things they need to think about for the future. I mean, the wallpaper is eventually going to wear out, how are they going to replace that; the carpeting; how close do they have to stick to the colors of everything. Now, even five years later, you probably can’t get the same carpet, so it is a decorating issue. That’s all going to have to be kept up in a certain way. They can match colors; they can conserve the actual model in a traditional way.
John: Yeah, I think you have to make certain assumptions: there will be moving images in the future; it will be possible to make them in different sizes; exactly what the technology is we are not quite sure, but they are probably not going to go away. In the case of the SFMOMA piece, the script is tied very tightly to the central core architecture of the building. That was a decision that Janet and George made when they were thinking about it, such that it could be collectable. It relied on putting up one painting from the permanent collection that was actually in the piece. The other parts of it were really things that could change over time, and the script accounted for that in ways that would mean that the experience the audience was having of the building could undergo a certain amount of evolution and change, but the integrity of the piece would remain.
Okay, we started a bit late here, so we are going to break for five minutes and then come on back. Thank you. Janet and George will be there this evening for the reception, so you will have another chance during the reception tonight to talk.