Janet Cardiff

Cardiff works with a fusion of fiction and reality, deliberately blurring the boundaries of past and present, of narrative and the everyday, and of sound and space, challenging viewers to re-examine how we perceive the world. “In the pieces we rely on architecture to set up a certain expectation,” Cardiff explains. “As a viewer you know the space – you’re sitting in theatre seats or you’re looking into a little theatre box and see the stage and understand that there will be content coming off the screen. As artists, we play on those expectations and then pull the rug out from under people – the screen goes black and there is just sound around, or the film burns up and then there’s a gun shot… It makes you think about space and it makes you think about the environment around you as you are sucked into and then pushed out of the film.”

Cardiff’s art also calls attention to how the senses can sometimes be deceptive when we have a certain expectation about what reality is. “During the Renaissance when they first invented perspective, there was a whole rhetoric around reality and how the drawings seemed real, and then when photographs were first invented people were freaked out because they thought the photographs were real. When you follow the rhetoric about reality right up to the present, the dialogue hasn’t really changed that much – and now we have reality TV. What has happened over the generations is that people’s consciousness has changed and so has our ability to understand reality in different levels. But where is it going to lead? We are all trying to push each other to a new understanding of reality – a much more spiritual level, maybe…”

Janet Cardiff first became known by her attempts to facilitate altered perceptions through “sound walks.” These site-specific audio and video tours are now available in cities all over the world. Layering sound onto urban landscapes, she invites participants into a dream world by bringing in the history, mystery and veracity of a location – where “reality is siphoned” into her amorphous narrative. Once you are equipped with headphones and, depending on the piece, a hand-held video screen, Cardiff’s voice leads you on a forty- to fifty-minute journey. The surroundings on the predetermined route are intertwined with a story the viewer is now partially responsible for. It is the participant that brings life to the work.