the Murder of Crows, a sound installation by Cardiff & Miller (MCA Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin)

With "The Murder of Crows", their largest sound installation to date, the Canadian visual artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller continue the explorations they embarked on in the mid-1990s into the sculptural and physical attributes of sound.

In the otherwise empty historical hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof, 98 loudspeakers are installed. These emit the sounds of voices, music and soundscapes generated by special stereophonic recording and replay techniques, creating a composition that has a direct physical impact on the listener. The special Ambisonic soundfield system generates a greatly intensified aural and emotional space, so that the acoustic events that transpire in the three-dimensional soundspace have a startling, disconcerting immediacy. The installation is conceived like a film or a play, but one whose images and narrative structures are created by sound alone. The three-part work, composed in collaboration with Freida Abtan, Tilman Ritter and Titus Maderlechner, is 30 minutes long.


In the installation by Cardiff & Miller, one hears Janet Cardiff's voice, coming from a megaphone lying on a table at the center of the room, relating thoughts and dreams. Like Goya's sleeping man, she is a captive of her own nightmares, experiencing dreadful scenes fraught with fear and terror. Sounds and noises roam the space of the exhibition like the owls and bats that flit around the sleeper in Goya's etching. In the transition from one sound world to the next, the work's structure follows the illogical yet somehow interrelated progressions that we know from the realm of dreams. The sound piece becomes a requiem for a world that has lost its bearings, where a dearth of reason - but also an excess of expedient rationality - has brought forth unimaginable atrocities, madness, and catastrophe.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• sound
• art
• installation
• goya
• nightmare
• dream