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Editor's Notes

1. BFA - Bachelor of Fine Art MVA - Market Value Accounting George Bures Miller Born: 1960, Vegreville, Alberta, Canada Lives and works: Berlin, Germany, and Grindrod, British Columbia, Canada
2. In Real Time (1999) was the very first video walk that Cardiff created. It took place in the library of the Carnegie Museum of Art and begins with the participant donning a pair of headphones attached to a small video camera. Upon playback Cardiff says to watch the screen and follow along with what we see and hear for approximately 18 minutes. This piece relies on the discrepancies between what is seen on the video monitor and what is actually occurring in the library.
3. While listening to a portable listening device or watching the screen of a camcorder, you are guided by Cardiff's recorded voice which are intercut with bits of ambient sound or sound effects recorded in binaural audio. This binaural technique gives the recordings three-dimensional sound and creates a dislocating uncertainty concerning what is recorded "fiction" and what is "reality."
4. Represented Canada a 16-seat movie theatre where viewers watched a mystery film and became entangled as witnesses to a possible crime played out in the audience and on the screen. "The Paradise Institute" was a huge success and the artists won La Biennale di Venezia Special Award at Venice, which was presented to Canadian artists for the first time. The Benesse prize, an award that recognizes an artist, or group, that tries to break new artistic ground with an experimental and pioneering spirit.
5. In her Forty Part Motet she placed 40 speakers in 8 groups, each speaker playing a recording of one voice singing Thomas Tallis' Spem in alium, enabling the audience to walk through the space and "sample" individual voices of the polyphonic vocal music. This work is now part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
6. "A remarkable thing about Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's utterly captivating sound installation is how it blurs distinctions between site and art. You enter a clearing in the forest, sit down on a wooden stump, and simply listen. Cardiff and Bures Miller's work incorporates the actual forest into an audio composition emitted from more than thirty speakers. Sometimes there is a near synchronicity of natural and mediated sounds, and it's tough to discern what is live and what is recorded. On a sunny day you hear the rustling breeze, but also the recording of a dramatically escalating wind that sounds intensely real. You sonically register that a storm is approaching, even though your eyes tell you otherwise; when you hear a branch loudly snap overhead (in the recording), you become instantly fearful and flinch. The recorded sounds move in a sphere around you, and you feel as if you're in the shifting presence of history. There are the sounds of war: whistling screeches, big explosions, the rat-a-tat of machine gun fire. There is a brief but shocking scream, a crashing tree, sounds of a mother and child, clanging metal. Singers come close, but then leave. You hear the trees and the wind again, and the crickets and birds. In turn frightening and deeply touching, ominous and serene, Cardiff and Bures Miller's forest soundscape is a wonder in the park, and one of the best works in the whole exhibition."