A world of sound: high-tech effects, B-movie suspense and urban alienation all take a turn in an internationally touring exhibition that surveys Janet Cardiff's installations and audio walks

Art in America, April, 2002 by Aruna D'Souza

All this is effected in a work that expresses a deep and affectionate. fascination with the movies, even as it self-effacingly parodies its own relation to them. In both The Paradise Institute and The Muriel Lake Incident, you hear the female narrator mistake the deliberately amateurish film on the screen for specific Hollywood classics. It is hard to mistake the anachronism-ridden The Muriel Lake Incident for Citizen Kane: despite the vaguely "Old West" character of the scenes, one sees Cardiff dancing in an antique-filled room with a wired fax machine sitting on the piano, or Bures Miller (as the cowboy) sitting on an Ikea folding chair in front of the campfire, for example. These "errors" interrupt any claim to realism--a realism otherwise suggested by the uncanny three-dimensionality of the audiotrack--that these works might possess, bringing you to a sudden consciousness of the film as a constructed fiction, defying your ability to suspend disbelief for the duration of your involvement with the piece, disrupting the reality effect that narrative cinema depends on.

Two of the earliest pieces in the show--To Touch (1993) and The Dark Pool--are highly instructive regarding Cardiff's and Bures Miller's relation to the technology they employed in their subsequent work. To Touch, a work by Cardiff, consists of a darkened room, in the center of which sits a spotlighted table; 16 small speakers are mounted along four walls. The table is wooden, old and scarred, and when you run your hands over its surface, you trip sensors embedded there, triggering a series of nine different soundtracks: conversations between a man and woman played back on separate speakers, people breathing loudly, snippets from 1950s movies, foreboding music, chanting voices and various other sounds. The viewer of the work thus becomes a kind of performer (Cardiff has described the role as akin to that of a DJ (3)) allowing these various narrative fragments to be "released" from the table and its architectural surround.

The Dark Pool, which Cardiff made in collaboration with Bures Miller, consists of another darkened room, lit only by bare lightbulbs hanging from wires. The room is filled with stuff--old clothes on a rack, a rickety cot, tables stacked with books, curios, outmoded scientific equipment, dusty armchairs, dirty dishes and apparently purposeless mechanical objects. It appears to be a sort of laboratory, abandoned by its occupants--described by Cardiff as a scientific couple (4)--who were in search of a fictional geological anomaly called "The Dark Pool," a lake that defies the laws of physics. As you move through the space, you trigger audio playbacks: a man and a woman conversing, various voices (including that of a child) reading fables and pseudoscientific texts about the Dark Pool, the sound of a man counting from 1 to 500. Only slowly, as you explore the idiosyncrasies of this cluttered room, do the contours of the disjointed narrative emerge.

In both of these pieces, technology is figured in a curious way: while relying on a relatively sophisticated use of motion sensors and audio playback devices, the installations deflect a viewer's awareness of the technology. What you are faced with, on the contrary, are quite emphatically nontechnological objects and devices: a battered old carpenter's table with no visible wiring in the case of To Touch and, in The Dark Pool, an accumulation of objects that declare their out-modedness at every turn. The books are old, the Viewfinder through which you are asked to peer is a favorite, low-tech toy of the artist's distant youth, as is the cup-and-string "telephone." The machines (such as a contraption labeled "wishing machine" set up in the corner of the room and the vaguely mechanomorphic device that transfers liquid along a tube in an endless circuit with the help of a motorized pump) seem not just purposeless, but decidedly antirational. If in To Touch the mechanics of the sound technology are hidden, in The Dark Pool they are subsumed in the tangle of electrical wiring that snakes down from the ceiling to connect to old-fashioned lamps and trumpet-shaped Victrola speakers, such that it becomes effectively camouflaged. We are not meant, in either case, to notice the newness of the technology, but simply to experience its effects, an intention that applies to the cinema-based works and the walks as well. (5)