Genealogy of personal playback devices in the audio and video walks of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

Abstract

When discussing artworks within an art historical discourse, there is a tendency to revert to paradigms of sensibility, narrative or meaning and disregard the structure of an artwork. This inclination is evident in discussions of the audio and video walks of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Although these standard models acknowledge the sound component of Cardiff and Miller’s walks, they overlook the specificity of Cardiff and Miller’s material.

This paper analyses the trajectory from the audio walks to the video walks. It discusses Forest Walk (1991) made with a cassette Walkman and binaural sound, Chiaroscuro (1996) the first walk to used video, and the transition to the video iPod touch in Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012). This paper shows a parallel that emerges from the genealogy of consumer playback devices and Cardiff and Miller’s audio walks made in the early 1990s, to the video walks produced in the late 1990s to today. Although the media employed in each walk evolved over time, the binaural sound used to generate the spatial soundscape remained consistent.

An examination of the specificity of Cardiff and Miller’s material not only establishes new insights into their walks, but also provides evidence of the need for discourse to emerge from a direct analysis of artworks.