Shifting between fact and fiction, between the experience of the real and our projections, fantasies, and desires, Janet Cardiff's audio-video and multimedia installations explore the complexity and vertiginous nature of subjectivity in a highly technological world. They are interactive pieces where visitors are asked to touch, listen, smell, and often move through an environment shaped both by our perceptions and by the artist's alteration of them. With references to film noir, science fiction, cyber-punk and various other filmic genres, her works, often created in collaboration with husband George Bures Miller, address the constant need to negotiate between presence and loss of self, memory and experience, sensation and imagination.
Janet Cardiff is well-known for her early-days “sound walks” where participants were given a Walkman or similar device to listen to as they walked about. Stories were told or experiences recounted in the audio track. The idea is simple, but from what I understand (never had the pleasure..) it was the story that made the experience engaging.
I first came across Cardiff’s work while doing sort of informal background research for the PDPal project where we were trying to understand interaction in the wild — away from desks and keyboard and all that.
What I find curious about her work is the way it augments reality before people even really thought about all this augmented reality stuff — but, it does not fetishize little tiny screens and orientation sensing and GPS and all that. It uses our earballs rather than our eyeballs — and somehow that makes it all much less fiddly. Although — if you look carefully at the bottom image you’ll see an image from a project in which one does use a screen — from a small DV camera which is playing a movie for you as you go along.
Parenthetically, I think Cardiff had one of the best augmented reality projects with her telescopes. I’ve only seen this as documentation when I saw Cardiff talk in Berlin at Transmediale 08. There should be more documentation of this somewhere, but the effect was to look through the telescope and see a scene in a back alley that was the back alley — only with a suspicious set of activities being committed — perhaps a crime. The illusion was in the registration but the story was in the sequence of events that one saw, effectively the story. So much augmented reality augments nothing except coupons and crap like that. There is no compelling story in much augmented reality, but I don’t follow it closely so maybe things have changed.
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Biography
Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, born in 1957, represented Canada at the 2001 Venice Biennale and was awarded a prize for her and George Bures Miller's work "The Paradise Institute." She has created site-specific audio and video works for a number of group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Sao Paulo Biennial; and the Carnegie International, among others.Publisher
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center Janet Cardiff on Amazon Janet Cardiff on Good ReadsSpecifications
Cover Softcover Pages 200pp Dimensions 10 x 1 x 12.25 inchesNo notes
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