NEW YORK—Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are among the most consistently imaginative of new media artists. For years, Cardiff was best known for her audio walks: curated tours in which audience members would each be given a set of headphones from which they heard instructions as to where to walk and, equally important, fictional asides that interrupted or added nuance to the walked reality. The soundtracks for these walks, and a number of Cardiff and Miller’s later works, are recorded in binaural sound with microphones that are attached to a full-size model of a human head. The result is so accurately captured and so eerily realistic that, listening to it, you find yourself entirely convinced by the aural illusion: Someone whispers in your ear or runs past you and you turn your head to see them. The experience is simultaneously total and alienating, almost as if you’ve been granted intimate access to another person’s mind.

Cardiff and Miller have proven themselves perennially inventive and quick-witted artists: Sound recording techniques pioneered in the walks, in addition to the many other audio techniques that they have explored, have been used in installation pieces that viewers physically enter, and Cardiff and Miller have evolved a whole area of sound, video, and installation works that is uniquely their own. They employ such diverse forms as slide shows, telephone conversations, choral recitals, canoe trips, and torture chambers to seduce their audience into illusory worlds that seem utterly compelling, but which they then rather playfully disrupt. Movie projectors appear to malfunction, the couple discuss a series of projected slides but then start arguing about how the audience is meant to understand them, or an invisible man, detected only by his shadow, replaces the stylus on a long-playing record. The result is at once utterly engaging, and entertainingly and self-consciously counterfeit.

The duo currently has a retrospective exhibition, “The Killing Machine, and Other Stories 1995–2007,” on view at the Insitut Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt, Germany. The show debuted at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and tours to the Miami Art Museum this fall, and it is accompanied by a remarkable publication—almost as multi-layered as their walks and installations—which includes a DVD of videos of some of their better-known pieces. In addition, their 2005 installation work Opera for a Small Room will be included in the exhibition “Voice and Void,” which opens in September at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn.

Cardiff and Miller spoke to ARTINFO from their studio in British Columbia, where they are preparing new work.

Janet, George, I’m fascinated by how you intertwine reality and illusion in your work. Your installation The Paradise Institute (2001) [see an excerpt of the video], for example, looks like a couple of packing cases from the outside, but once you go inside and put the headphones on, you’re in an old-fashioned cinema.

Janet Cardiff: George often calls it a “cinema-simulator”...

George Bures Miller: It’s the full cinema experience: the audience around you, the friend beside you...

...the plush seats. And then you’re transported.

Except you’re constantly tripping the simulation up.

Yeah, exactly. We’re fascinated by pulling the rug out from under the viewer. We create a reality within a piece, like the model cinema in The Muriel Lake Incident (1999), but then at one point it appears as if the film is breaking, so the viewer has to think about the technology of the piece. They realize that they’re not inside the story anymore and think, “Oh, I’m viewing an installation piece.”

You offer them illusions that they don’t necessarily understand but can discover.

Everyone experiences the piece in different ways. We try to put multiple layers in there to allow that. We definitely try to get to the third or fourth reality, but I’m not sure that every viewer gets there.