Exhibition:Lost in a Memory Palace

The multimedia artworks of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller emphasize aural and visual experiences that transport the viewer to other realms of consciousness. Their work is highly scripted, meticulously detailed and often cinematic in scope, breaking down distinctions between fiction and everyday reality.There’s the mood of film noir and murder mysteries in much of Cardiff and Miller’s art. 

The Memory Palace is a noisy place. It is filled with the crashing of thunder, the thumping of drums, the soaring of operatic arias, the barking of dogs, the rumbling of freight trains, and the conversations of fictional characters.

This palace is also, as realized in a series of immersive environments, sound sculptures, and multimedia constructions by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, replete with old found objects, shiny new technologies, and fragments of mysterious narratives. They’re narratives we may or may not be able to patch together into a coherent whole.

The memory palace of the title is an allusion to  an ancient mnemonic technique that involves calling to mind sequential rooms in an imaginary palace, each associated with a particular memory that can be summoned by mentally walking through it.

The memories summoned by Cardiff and Miller are often unsettling, occasionally disturbing, and frequently dark. Throughout the show, there are suggestions of fictional violence—of suicide, torture, murder, execution.

Throughout this exhibition, sound is the most powerful, the most original, and the most resonant element—literally and figuratively resonant. It does not simply complement the multimedia installations but drives them. It directs our emotional and physical response to them and is responsible, more than anything else here, for our investment in the fictional scenarios, our willing suspension of disbelief.

The Killing Machine, an extremely disturbing installation in which robotic arms swoop and dance and torture an invisible victim, strapped to a dentist’s chair. This work draws its references from Franz Kafka’s The Penal Colony and the persistence of capital punishment in the United States

Sound is the enfolding fourth dimension in Experiment in F# Minor, in which 72 denuded speakers of different sizes lie face up on a couple of rough wooden tables and emit a cacophony of electronic groans and beeps along with voices speaking, sirens wailing, trucks roaring, pianos tinkling, and drumbeats laid over guitar riffs. Each sound in this wondrously complex piece is triggered by our shadows as we walk around it, so that our shadows become embodied.

 Allusions to a woman who may have been killed by a train in Opera for a Small Room, a cluttered space into which we peer, trying to make sense of the multitude of old records and record players and our own voyeuristic encounter with an unseen, reclusive occupant.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAhrSiUeP2I