Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

Image courtesy Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

"Opera for a Small Room" (2005), Installation view, Kunsthaus Bregenz

Image courtesy Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

"Playhouse" (1997), Film still

For more on Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, visit their
Web site, www.cardiffmiller.com.

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Yeah, when you have the binaural audio simulating an audience counting all around them, people want to be part of that. Everybody wants to participate in a situation like that, but we also create a sense of alienation to make people feel a little uncomfortable, like in Playhouse when the audience starts laughing at the singer. You’re not supposed to do that to a performer...

But she behaves like it’s a perfectly reasonable response.

That’s part of our storytelling technique. We throw in these MacGuffins. We use them not so much in the Hitchcockian sense of keeping the plot moving, but to keep the audience’s brains moving. The audience has to think about them and wonder what it is and why—“Why is the [virtual] audience counting?” They make up a story for themselves, and that generates this whole other reality.

So much in your work is fleeting. Something appears briefly, and almost before the audience can register it, it’s gone. So I wonder how you feel about the video versions of your pieces. People can run the video forward and back, and the pieces become much more transparent.

We talked about that, whether it was appropriate or not. That’s the catch-22 of documentation. It’s difficult to have catalogues of our work, because it’s time-based and performance-oriented. The video doesn’t show the whole story, for sure; when people go to the real physical piece they experience something completely different. But we always design our work for ourselves, and we don’t like to get bored. So we design things that you’re supposed to see a couple of times over...

...or more...

...so that you can unravel it.

Some of your pieces begin one way, and by the time they finish, they’ve turned into something completely different. Opera for a Small Room starts as a quiet, contemplative piece and ends up as a rock opera.

As we edit we always follow our intuitions and our feelings. What do we feel we need next? It’s like when you’re doing a drawing—you need juxtapositions. Or like making a good meal: “Mmm, what do I feel like now?”

Janet and I have different stories as to what actually goes on in the opera. What goes on in the piece is not set in stone. That opens it up for the audience to develop their own stories as well. It’s boring for people if it’s obvious.

Your work is full of references to other art forms. There’s a lot of “art about art” around these days, but it seems to me that your art is more about the delight of experiencing art.

Yeah. Or the delight of just experiencing.

I don’t really think our work is “art about art” at all. We’re more fascinated by the entertaining arts, so it could be art about...

...magic...

...or about dance, or film, or theater. Those are the things that inspire us. We’re interested in what goes on in your brain when you’re at the theater or at the dance, when you’re in those moments of engagement, those moments of euphoria, those moments of complete...

...suspension of disbelief.

Your work is technically sophisticated, but it’s never about technology. And yet you do seem to have this fascination with rather eccentric scientists’ laboratories or inventors’ workshops.

Yeah, in The Dark Pool (1995), which was our first formal collaboration, there are many different layers to the story and theme. There’s a whole fiction about this invented place called “the Dark Pool,” but George and I have often thought it’s also like a laboratory for senselessness. In some ways art is just that—two people working in a room, creating a room; they’re artists, but they’re scientists...

...But their experiments have no purpose. The Dark Pool is all about that. It’s a purposeless investigation into things that really matter.