Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller: Aural Embodiment/Virtual Presence

Sophie Knezic (University of Melbourne)

 

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The Canadian duo Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller’s sound installations offer the spectator a multi-sensorial experience constructed through narrative and aural fragments – of music, memories, dreams and fictions. These fractured elements assembled by the artists retain a quality of intimate otherness yet, through the technology of ambisonic and binaural sound, appear unerringly close. With sounds heard as if in real-space as well as real-time the spectator-listener is mediated by the artists’ virtual presence and co-opted into their oneiric worlds, submitting to melded experiences of sensual apprehension where distinctions between autonomous timespans and subjectivities fray. Through our saturation in digitised media in the contemporary world the dislocations occurring between our bodily locale and our spaces of cognition are often taken for granted yet in Cardiff and Bures Miller’s aural environments our very corporeality is virtualised, simultaneously transported to other spatial and temporal locations while anchored in a sensorial present. This experience activates distinct modes of imbricated consciousness, correspondent with Brian Massumi’s proposition of the virtual as a form of bodily potentiality and Roberto Diodato’s articulation of the inter-relational nature of the virtual.