description: To the delight of museum-goers around the world the internationally acclaimed audio-artist creates "sound fictions", carefully orchestrated experiences combining music, ambient sounds and narrative. Donning headphones and following a pre-ordained path, the listener becomes a participant in a shared exploration of sensory perceptions. For the current project, her site is a large garden on Lake Ontario. Conversations and events are strung together in such a way as to suggest a mystery. The gentle park becomes a place with the potential for tragedy. An organ grinder, opera singers, buzzing bullets and helicopters punctuate our reactions. The experience is all-encompassing due to a 32-track recording of binaural sound with omni-directional microphones, thereby producing a three-dimensional sound that simulates human hearing. In her essay, Fleming talks about Cardiff's desire to go beyond the traditional barriers imposed by art. By developing a dramatic relationship between sound and vision, she is able to communicate more directly with an audience than other mediums allow. Fleming also discusses how Cardiff's work has grown out of earlier sound/vision experiments by artists like John Cage, Laurie Anderson and Derek Jarman. Includes an audio CD.
language: English
title: Janet Cardiff : A Large Slow River
titlecomplete: Janet Cardiff : A Large Slow River
ratings_count: 3
publisher: Oakville Galleries