Interview: Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller

Welcome to Barbara London Calling 3.0

In my podcast series Barbara London Calling, I host conversations with pioneering and up-and-coming artists from all over the world. Together we explore what motivates and inspires these artists, what technologies they use in their unusually varied practices, and how they see the world as artists working at the forefront of technology and creativity.

Barbara London: My guests today are Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, two sound and installation artists who began collaborating in 1995. Based in rural British Columbia, they often travel internationally to develop and install their artwork, which explores the idea of narration and the plasticity of noise, sound, music, and poetry. Their work has been shown in many exhibitions and in major museums around the world. Janet and George, thank you both for joining me.

Janet Cardiff: Oh, thank you for inviting us.

George Bures Miller: Yeah, it’s great to be here.

Barbara London: Although visual, to me your work is sonic at its core. So, let’s begin with your first collaboration, The Dark Pool (1995).

On entering the installation, the audience encounters an elaborate assemblage of furniture, carpets, books, empty dishes and mechanical paraphernalia, a realm of suspended animation. Moving through the installation, the audience activates acoustic components of the work: strands of music, echoes of stories, and fragments of dialogue. Similar to your other work, the viewer engages with a magical environment, almost a cabinet of curiosities that has a strong sense of personal history. Can you tell me about how this first collaboration came about?

Janet Cardiff: It was 1994, when I was invited to do a residency and show at Western Front in Vancouver and I didn’t know quite what we were doing or what I was doing. George and I had lived together for a long time, and we would sit and have coffee together, talk about ideas a lot and stuff like that. We had this one piece that we couldn’t remember whose idea it was. So, I proposed to Western Front, the space in Vancouver, “Could we possibly do a collaboration for this piece?” They went, “Sure.” So basically, it was the first time that we officially worked together.

Listen to the full episode at barbaralondon.net