Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: The Killing Machine and Other Stories, 1995-2007

The Canadian artist-team Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have built up an impressive multimedia practice in which sound and voice are both material and subject. Their disorienting sound environments derive their sources from a wide spectrum of musical, literary and cinematic genres such as medieval plainsong, pulp fiction, literary fiction or film noir, transforming a walk along a street into a hallucinatory existential thriller in which visual and aural input can wildly clash or mesh. Cardiff and Miller first gained international recognition for collaborations such as "The Secret Hotel," in which participants were able to experience the atmospheres of rooms in a grand hotel, and "The Paradise Institute," a hit with visitors at the 2001 Venice Biennial, which conjured a turn-of-the-century movie theater in which the main role was played by a parallel soundtrack of noises that usually disturb audiences: whispers, coughs and rustling bags of popcorn. A concise retrospective, The Killing Machine and Other Stories 1995-2007 profiles such previous works alongside more recent ones that have never been published before. It is a comprehensive reader, containing previously unpublished written and visual material, and pertinent literature on the oeuvre of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.