Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller Photo: Zev Tiefenbach
Sculptural Sound—The Art of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
By Louis Corrigan
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller opened their permanent gallery in Enderby, B.C., on July 29, 2023 to showcase their artworks created over the years. The Cardiff Miller Art Warehouse was repurposed from the showroom and warehouse for an Ashley furniture store.
Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s extraordinary personal and professional partnership has produced some of contemporary art’s most innovative multimedia work. Its diversity and singularity may owe something to the fact that while the couple remains enmeshed in the international art world, they live far from it.
Twenty-one years ago they bought a house with a studio in Grindrod, B.C., a small town halfway between Calgary and Vancouver. This rural retreat appealed to them because Cardiff grew up on a farm outside Brussels, Ontario and Miller in a small town in Alberta where his father was a veterinarian. They later added an adjacent house and now have a compound with 20 acres, two horses, and two studios to work on different projects at once. Their house overlooks a lovely pond surrounded by farms and low mountains.
In July 2023, they opened the Cardiff Miller Art Warehouse in nearby Enderby in an old furniture warehouse minimally renovated into a raw, 19,000-foot exhibition space. The Warehouse presents ten of their largescale installations, all time-based experiential pieces, including most of the works highlighted here. The lobby has a relaxed, welcoming vibe with a sample of Miller’s project sketches, Cardiff’s recent paintings and figurines, and an art library related to their work.
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The couple met in 1980 at the University of Alberta where Cardiff was working on her Masters in printmaking and Miller was an undergraduate studying painting before switching to film. They collaborated on a sound recording on one of their first dates and then on a Super-8 film. They’ve made work involving some degree of collaboration ever since, much of it co-authored.
Cardiff popped onto the international art scene in the mid-90s with site-specific, headphone-based audio walks such as those at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum (1996), Germany’s Münster Skulptur Projekte (1997), and the Villa Medici French Academy in Rome (1998). Several elements made these works groundbreaking and astounding. The binaural recording process (think dummy head with a microphone at each ear) created a hyper realistic sense of space through sound. Cardiff’s quiet, flat voice within this headspace fostered unexpected intimacy that proved both captivating and schizophrenic. The walks required the listener’s active participation in navigating public areas and this movement produced a flow of opportunities to coordinate and juxtapose real and recorded environments.
The format gave free rein to Cardiff’s narrative sensibilities shaped by literary and film favorites such as detective fiction, film noir, science fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, New Wave era French cinema such as Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), and E.J. Dunne’s odd inquiry into precognitive dreams, An Experiment in Time (1927). A drive to uncover some mystery underpinned the walks but with the narrative fractured and layered in audio collages built through Miller’s precision audio and script editing. Participants felt they were “dreaming another’s dreams,” as curator Kitty Scott put it. Cardiff’s binaural walks constituted a sophisticated new contemporary art form and led to numerous commissions for audio and then co-authored video walks, most recently Night Walk for Edinburgh (2019).
The artists then collaborated on three faux theater experiments culminating in The Paradise Institute (2001), a binaural mini-theater project for the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It won the Premio Speciale award for artists who “break new artistic ground with an experimental and pioneering spirit.” The viewer entered a small wooden structure and sat in one of two rows of velvet seats in what looked like the balcony of an old movie palace. The fragmented noir thriller onscreen competed for your attention with the fictional theater environment as the uncanny binaural recording in your headphones put you next to Cardiff’s voice offering popcorn and worrying about leaving the stove on. The film peril penetrated this audio world when the villain’s voice suddenly landed next to you. Sculptural sound repositioned the viewer as participant, which felt both playful and unnerving.
Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet, 2001, (A reworking of “Spem in Alium” by Thomas Tallis 1573),40 loud speakers mounted on stands, placed in an oval, amplifiers, playback computer 14 min. loop with 11 min. of music and 3 min. of intermission, Photo: Marcus Tretter, Courtesy the Artists and Luhring Augustine, NYC
The Forty Part Motet (2001), one of the century’s most renowned contemporary artworks, premiered the same year. Credited to Cardiff with editing support from Miller, Motet featured 16th century English composer Thomas Tallis’s complex choral composition Spem in Alium (1573) for eight sets of five singers. The artists recorded each voice separately, and the installation arrays 40 speakers in an oval. Audience members can stand in the middle and feel the power of the song’s spatial movement, or they can walk around and listen to each individual voice. Although the work is visually minimalist, the music’s beauty can leave audience members in tears. That reception was reinforced by its presentation at New York City’s MoMA PS1 just one month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
America’s post-9/11 wars influenced two of their major works that followed. The Killing Machine (2007) grew out of the chilling Franz Kafka story “In the Penal Colony” about a man proudly in charge of a mechanical device that inflicts death after hours of torture for crimes unproven but carved into the offender’s body. This four-minute piece springs into action when an audience member presses a button to activate two robots that drill into an imagined victim in a constructed torture room. By the end, the lighting turns playful as a disco ball revolves overhead in a turn toward black comedy: state violence as entertainment.
The couple then produced The Murder of Crows (2008), a complex 30-minute sound-only work driven by three of Cardiff’s actual nightmares where a machine grinds up babies, a general threatens to cut off a boy’s leg, and a bodiless leg appears under bed covers. The piece deploys a panoply of musical segments, from the exuberant anti-fascist Soviet marching song “The Sacred War” that moves powerfully through the space to an opera aria lamenting the leg lost to a bomb. Crows gather noisily. The only balm comes with Cardiff singing a Miller-composed indie rock lullaby.
Cardiff and Miller’s oeuvre also includes several examples of an entire world captured in a small space. Set in a caravan, The Marionette Maker (2014) depicts a marionette who makes other marionettes while a human-sized sleeping beauty lies in the back, a tiny guitar player performing near her feet. A poignant stage performance of Tchaikovsky’s plaintive “None But the Lonely Heart” by a small mechanical singer and pianist caps the installation’s 14-minute sequence.
This world-making impulse finds different form in Escape Room (2021), a Covid-era work that invites the audience to move through a kind of artist’s studio encountering motion-activated audio elements with clues to the post-apocalyptic miniatures on view, such as a deserted modern cityscape and Tower of Babel hive structure. Cardiff’s voice wonders what we would find if we could walk backstage in our world to see the matrix makers constructing our lives. Across the room, Miller reads about lost gods from Borges’s “The Immortal.”
I spoke with the artists at the Warehouse on Saturday, September 20, 2025. Our conversation explored their entire career history with a focus on their innovative use of sound and their process-oriented approach to artmaking.
Louis Corrigan
Atlanta, Georgia 2025
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Escape Room, 2021, Interactive multimedia installation with proximity sensors, lights, sounds and handmade models,
Courtesy the Artists and Luhring Augustine, NYC
Louis Corrigan: We’re here at your Art Warehouse in Enderby, a town of 3,000 people, in what is, to me, a very remote part of Canada.
Janet Cardiff: Remote, it is. Grindrod, where we live...
LC: Is farmland. Coming in I passed corn and blueberries.
George Bures Miller: Best blueberries, man, I tell you.
JC: I spent the first 18 years of my life on a working farm. I love being in the country. We live right on a river, so we swim every day, and it's just gorgeous.
LC: And you had thought about creating an art space with your work?
GBM: Oh, forever. We’ve always kept artist proofs with the intention that we would someday have a building to show them.
JC: Also, it's a treat for an artist to be able to see their own work and learn from it. When we started setting up here, the first piece was The Murder of Crows and I was like, how did we do this piece? I'm always finding this in the studio, you get so involved in the work, it’s like you become a different person. Then a couple of years after, you go, how did I do that?
LC: The Murder of Crows is a sound work for 98 speakers. It’s got a huge footprint even though it’s just freestanding speakers and chairs. It gets very loud. I imagine it’s a difficult piece to show in a lot of places. But it's an amazing piece. Just sonically.
GBM: Thanks.
LC: There are so many musical genres included and the way the sound moves through the space is so powerful. At the narrative core are three of Janet’s dreams, really, nightmares. Obviously dream logic has been a big part of your work from 1992 or something.
JC: Yeah, early on.
LC: Is Crows your first piece to actually include a series of full dreams?
JC: Yeah, we've done some smaller works, like telephone works where you pick up a telephone and you can hear a dream, but this was the first larger work. Our main intention at the beginning was to create a piece that was just sound, no vocals.
GBM: But it wasn’t working. It needed a narrative. It needed a structure.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Murder of the Crows, 2008, Mixed media installation, Duration:30 minutes, Courtesy the Artists and Luhring Augustine, NYC
JC: We started working on the piece in Kathmandu. We were there for six months. That's when I started recording my dreams.
GBM: It brought the piece together and a lot of the music we'd already been recording worked perfectly with the dreams. Then we added the opera. Every piece is like that. You work it up, you figure it out, you go, oh, it's not working, let's change it.
JC: Some of the dreams are creepy. Like a machine that puts babies in. After the texts were established, we found sounds that resonated with the words, like for that scene we put in dripping sounds and textile factory sounds that we recorded in Kathmandu.
GBM: You don't realize how macabre it is until some kid comes out and they're white. Somebody went into therapy after hearing it multiple times. He said, he loved the piece, “but it made me realize I needed therapy.”
JC: There was a trauma there that he wasn't dealing with. And he says, “I really thank you for doing this.” It's great when art can do that. I got a text from another man who lives in the area and he said he was finally able to hear the Motet from beginning to end. On his way home he had to pull over and cry because he realized he didn't have enough joy in his life. If we can do a few things like that, it’s worth it. To me, art's so much about communication and trying to connect.
LC: That’s really great. George, could you talk about the ambisonic sound for The Murder of Crows? It's like binaural but without headphones, right?
GBM: We use ambisonic in that piece a lot, but then there are things you can't do with ambisonics, too. So, it's a mix. We call it panned audio, which is where you move the sound between one speaker and another by panning. In that piece we're using a 20 speaker pan so, you can bring the marchers in across the speakers.
Ambisonics fascinated us because of the connection to binaural for sure, that it would give you this spatial audio, without headphones. You can record with a single microphone that gives you four tracks of audio. From those, you can create any number of speaker matrices, like 30-40 in a sphere. We started using ambisonic in 2003 on Berlin Files because we'd been doing a lot of headphone pieces and it’s a bit awkward and annoying. We did this piece in the pavilion for Venice where everyone had to put their headphones on.
LC: You mean the one you won the prize for!
GBM: Yeah, it was effective but so annoying ergonomically. You had to have a person giving instructions like, “Don't break the headphones and watch the cables.” With ambisonics you avoid that and yet have a similar immersion. In Murder of Crows the ambisonic sounds are the birds flying overhead, people running through the space, the monks singing.
JC: The dogs barking and the waves.
GBM: We use it in a lot of pieces just to create mood. It's also in The Marionette Maker.
JC: Like when the plane goes over.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Marionette Maker, 2014, Mixed media installation including caravan, marionettes, robotics, audio, and lighting,14 minutes, looped 184 x 222 x 130"
Courtesy the Artists and Luhring Augustine, NYC
GBM: We recorded some of the sounds out at our site in the country, so you get this feeling of this caravan sitting out there with the crickets. What was interesting about ambisonic compared to Sony or Dolby surround sound was that you never had height information before. As soon as you add that, you get a sphere of sound instead of a circle of sound.
LC: That feeling of being totally immersed is incredible. Crows is purely sound, but you feel like you're seeing a film. The sound is moving through you so you feel like you’re in the middle of this total experience.
GBM: That's great.
JC: Yeah, it's so true. A friend told me they took their daughter and it was the second time they had been to the building. And the daughter said, “What happened to the video screen? Last time, there was a video screen here.” I told her no, that was in her brain.
LC: Let’s talk about your binaural sound pieces. You discovered that early on. Was it with An Inability to Make a Sound (1992)?
JC: No, it was actually Forest Walk (1991). It's at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre. It's the very first audio walk that I made. I made it with a four-track Tascam on cassette.
LC: You were on a residency there?
JC: Yeah, in ‘91. It's a really basic walk but it established the whole concept and genre for me.
GBM: It’s not great in its technical sound.
JC: Or in its direction. You get lost. I think there were probably eight people that listened to it at the time. It’s in their collection now. Nobody knew if it was art or what it was because it was such a new format, just something that I was super interested in doing. I'd been playing around with the technology there. They had a Sennheiser 3D binaural dummy head. I was out walking around in a cemetery, just recording things. I pressed the wrong button and it was playing back my voice. I recognized that that was interesting. A serendipitous moment. Then I started doing experiments with the binaural and thinking, oh, it could be like a film. You can add crows here, the train passing over here.
GBM: This first walk she'd done on a four track, the second on reel-to-reel in a studio. But it's really hard to do this type of analog editing. It’s an invisible process. Right before the Louisiana Walk, in 1996 they came out with software that was like a pre-production Pro Tools. Then we could finally visually see the sound waves and move them around. Much easier for us.
JC: And it kept crashing like crazy. We took this huge computer with us as luggage to Denmark for eight tracks only but that allowed us to make the walks more complex.
GBM: Yes, you couldn't do it in a laptop. But we could really do a good job of editing because we could move the voice, sounds and footsteps where we needed them to be.
JC: In between that time was when I did Inability to Make a Sound because I was trying to think about how to create a binaural walk within a gallery space. That was the one we had to edit on reel-to-reel.
LC: Oh wow.
GBM: It was a nightmare.
LC: You've always been at the cutting edge of what the technology can do.
JC: Just by chance.
Janet Cardiff, Münster Walk,1997, Audio walk with mixed media props, 17 minutes, Curated by Kasper König (with assistant curator Ulrike Groos) for Skulptur Projekte
Courtesy the Artist and Luhring Augustine, NYC
LC: But your conceptual interests drive the work. There must have been a point in using the binaural where you began to understand what it could do. It’s interesting in terms of the intimacy created with the listener, or how you can play with time and space. You're on a walk in Denmark and suddenly the audio jumps to walking your dog along a river in Canada.
JC: Also, you hear the sound of horses on cobblestones. So then what era are you in? We loved how it would layer time and transport you. In The Missing Voice (1999) in London, there was a bombing in Brick Lane just 10 minutes after I was walking by there recording. I was lucky. But that area in the East End had been bombed during World War II as well. So, you bring in this different bombing and the listener’s going, which time period are we in?
I love that layering. As well as this concept of sculptural sound. The simple augmented reality that you can stimulate in people's imaginations is almost better than the complex virtual reality headgear, right? What we can imagine, in our minds, is such an amazing thing, that we have this virtual space that we can enter.
GBM: It’s a space very much like literature.
JC: Yeah. But at that Louisiana Museum show, it's also very lucky that Kasper König [legendary curator] did the walk and he recognized it as sculpture and invited us to do a piece for Münster Sculpture Project, a show that happens every ten years. We hadn't heard of it, of course. (Laughs)
GBM: We weren't very connected to the European art scene at that point.
LC: I’ve been listening to the audio walks at the Louisiana Museum, Münster, and Rome and reading the scripts. They're so rich. Imagining then layering on the experience of physically walking through the space, they become extremely complex. I love how you build trust with the listener. It's very conspiratorial, like, “I have something to show you.” So, you're drawn into this relationship with “J,” who's in your ear, telling you where to go and pointing things out.
JC: J Vox.
LC: It becomes this intimate experience that remains incredibly interesting. One critic [Jeannie R. Lee] talked about the listener entering a kind of masochistic contract.
JC: (Laughs)
GBM: I forgot about that.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Killing Machine, 2007, Mixed media, sound, pneumatics, robotics, 5 minutes, Courtesy the Artist and Luhring Augustine, NYC
LC: Because you’re submitting to the will of this person, J Vox, who says things like, “Now we're two people in one body.” Over time, you must have figured out how your voice was working.
JC: I learned a lot from them. At first it was just curiosity and thrill with how things were kind of magic and how you could make people believe things are happening around you with sound. But I started learning all about the intimacy that was involved. I always recorded the voice so it sounded like it was your thoughts and it was right at the back of your head. But then I realized, too, that it's a safe place because sometimes viewers of art can get too intimate with you. It was a safe place for me because I could be intimate with someone, but I have technology to protect me.
There was also that whole thing I learned about the walking and breathing with someone so you become a cyborg in ways and then as well the different levels of reality. You have the reality of the past recording and then sometimes there's even a recording within the recording like in The Missing Voice of those voice dictating recorders that you hear inside this three-dimensional matrix. Then you have the physical reality outside that you’re walking in and the two sound worlds mix creating a third space.
I’d like to go back to making some audio walks because I think there's a huge need for connection today.
LC: It must have been different when you added video. The audio-only walks allow your imagination to roam and create your own filmic scenario. When you're holding a video device, you get that disjuncture between what's on the screen and what's in real life but you’re also paying less attention to the audio.
JC: That’s so true.
GBM: That's why we would take the video away quite often when we do video walks. Suddenly, the screen would go black because we found that a lot of times you don’t even notice the sound so we would force the participant back to just the soundtrack.
LC: The audio walks are 15 to 20 minutes and the video walks longer, right? Like an hour?
JC: At first, we made them so short because we thought people wouldn't have the attention span. Then people kept saying, oh, I wish it was longer.
GBM: But the longer you make a piece, the amount of work increases exponentially.
JC: It’s a huge amount of labor behind the scenes.
LC: I was looking at two pages of script from the Münster walk. Just cut, cut, cut. There’s not a single line that got into the final version. It’s just fascinating. For the Rome piece, you’ve said the finished version is the 22nd edit of the script.
GBM: We had to re-edit it the week before the show because they changed their minds and wouldn’t let us use the route we had originally recorded. But then they let us go down into the underground passageways which was amazing.
JC: Oh, that was beautiful.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, FOREST (for a thousand years…), 2012, audio loop, 28 minutes, Courtesy the Artist and Luhring Augustine, NYC
GBM: A former director had put all these classical sculptures down there he didn't like. It was like a film set.
LC: That’s when you leave the listener in this cavern because the George character on tape, who’s been trapped in some kind of time/space warp, shows up.
GBM: Yeah, the batteries on the tape recorder die. That whole idea came from a couple that did the Münster Walk. The man kept falling behind because the tape was going slow.
JC: They thought it was two different walks and he thought his walk was a man’s voice.
GBM: It turned out his batteries were dying.
LC: That's a good segue into The Muriel Lake Incident (1999), a mini-cinema piece on display here. At the end, the film melts, the screen goes black, and the villain onscreen seems to have entered the viewer’s constructed theater reality. That piece led to The Paradise Institute (2001), the more fleshed out version of the same set up.
GBM: Right.
LC: Both of those depend on the binaural sound, but you’ve added a video element. With Paradise Institute, you know you’re in a tiny space, but you have this illusion of being in a theater. You put on headphones and immediately the fictional audience becomes very alive.
JC: There’s three in that series. The first one's called Playhouse (1997), with a little projection of an opera singer. We got an auditorium of students to make sounds for it like counting, laughing, clapping. In the audio track the opera singer would be singing and then all of a sudden, we mixed in the audience starting to laugh. It made the viewers so uncomfortable. We started realizing these different norms of acceptability and how much the audience brings to the experience.
LC: It feels like you brought what you learned from the walks to the theater setting. There’s an interpenetration between the layers of fiction and reality: the story on screen, your reality of sitting watching the screen and then the constructed reality of hearing a Janet character whispering next to you.
GBM: We had so much fun with that piece.
LC: Then you've got people shushing her. But the audience member finds herself at the center of the action as the antagonist onscreen seems to end up sitting right behind you by the end. And there's banging on the wall.
JC: Yeah, we recorded that right in the studio with friends banging on the physical theatre box with the microphone inside.
GBM: We were thinking of the people waiting outside who want to get in.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Paradise Institute, 2001, Mixed Media, 13 minutes,1m x 11m x 3m, Courtesy the Artists and Luhring Augustine, NYC
JC: People ask, how did you think about making this? We just follow our nose and do what we find interesting. I do some rough edits, and George will do the fine edits. And then he'll do a different type of edit. And I’ll go, that's great. But what about this? The way we work together, we’re thinking of different layers, but it's a bit convoluted. Someone called it cubist cinema, and I thought that was a perfect understanding of it. I've always loved collage and cubism.
GBM: That’s probably why we've never done a real film with binaural because it's such a different planning process.
JC: We had already shot three other films before but they got cut.
GBM: Yeah, we did a whole film that basically we hated. We’re just ridiculously bad at pre-visualizing.
JC: But we're very good at getting ideas from what we do. We're process artists. We need to see it and then respond to it. Like The Killing Machine was designed for six or eight robots. We had a whole different scenario for it. Then when we start building it, that's when you say ok, take this out, take this out, reductivism.
LC: For that piece, it seems like only when you got down to two robots could you see you had sort of dancers.
JC: Yeah, exactly. That was really fun because it’s like almost a sexual act at the end. They’re just like, “shoo shoo shoo” [moving].
GBM: I don’t see it that way. (Both laugh)
LC: The one piece that seems like an outlier to what you just described as your process is The Forty Part Motet (2001).
JC: Yeah, that’s true.
LC: Your immediate inspiration was, “I'd love to have these 40 voices surrounding me.”
JC: Yes. I wanted to physically “show” the piece of music as a sculpture, not just as a beautiful piece of music.
LC: Obviously, that was a technical challenge, but the only thing that ended up different was the talking, right?
JC: Yes, we added three minutes of intermission.
LC: While the singers take a break. You decided in real time to keep recording and chose to start with that segment. It's a sublime musical piece, but you realize it's not angels singing because you get to hear them at first as regular people.
JC: That really helps take the piece to another level.
GBM: But that's what’s great about it is you can wander around and listen to every voice individually.
JC: You go, “Oh, this tenor’s a bit weak there.” But it’s an incredibly difficult piece of music, and we had only three hours to record, with children involved. We wanted children for the soprano parts rather than women’s voices, but it made it quite difficult in the recording process.
GBM: You have a bunch of voices, some of them average singers, some of them amazing, like Rory, the bass is unbelievable. But then they all come together to form this incredible choral piece. There are so many conversations at the beginning. It’s fascinating. I hear something new every time I listen to it. I love the one about working with some Russian choir that was horribly off-key and the conductor was insane. We should really just record all those conversations at some point, release them as an anecdote on the internet.
JC: But the piece was very much pre-visualized and it became the piece that we imagined.
GBM: Almost not.
JC: Almost not because George had to really edit a lot after we installed it the first time.
GBM: I was trying to dissuade her from doing it because we were working on Paradise Institute at the same time. I put all the things in the way, like how much money it would cost, all the technical challenges. Then I said, you won't even know if it's any good until you set it up in a museum and press play. We jumped through all the hoops to produce it in England, and then we're at the National Gallery in Canada. We finally get it set up and press play. And it sounds like shit.
JC: And we were so disappointed.
LC: You're talking about one of the most celebrated works of the century!
JC: Yes, but we weren’t interested in just a normal recording. It needed to be spatial, like to be able to watch the voices moving across the space, back and forth then coming together then breaking apart. To experience it as sculpture. It didn’t work and it was going to be opening in three days.
GBM: And we couldn't figure out what was wrong. And then it turned out there are so many segments where somebody's not singing but their mic is picking up the person that's singing on the other side of the room.
JC: That’s called crosstalk.
GBM: And it's creating just this mud of overall sound.
JC: I imagined it so that you could see Tallis’s composition. Like being inside his brain.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Opera for a Small Room, 2005, Mixed media with sound, record players, records and synchronized lighting, 20-minute loop, 2,6 x 3 x 4,5m,
Courtesy the Artists and Luhring Augustine, NYC
GBM: So it would move around the space. But it wasn't moving. One choir was singing from five speakers, but you were hearing from the other 35 speakers as well. So, you're getting this weird reverb. I had to go around to each speaker with the score and figure out what tracks weren't supposed to be on. It was this arduous process because in 2001 you only had this tiny LCD screen to work on and you couldn’t see the waveforms. We did some editing and all of a sudden, we could hear what we wanted to hear.
LC: Hearing those waves of singers going back and forth is so powerful.
JC: Isn't it?
LC: What's it like having one of the most beloved and well-known contemporary art pieces?
JC: Thank you.
GBM: Pretty good. I can say that because it's not my piece.
JC: He wouldn't take credit even though he really helped make it.
GBM: She came downstairs with the idea completely hatched. Our collaborations are always when we have a long discussion about stuff. This was just her piece. I had nothing to do with it. Other than saving it. (Laughs)
LC: Clearly Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012), an also beloved multichannel video piece with musical performers, owes a lot to Motet.
JC: That’s a great piece. We're friends with Ragnar and he’s a great artist and musician. But it’s natural for works to have connections. Artists have a dialogue or like a connection of ideas between them, maybe because of the technology or the world we live in. I see a work like Ragnar’s and it inspires me. Artists build on each other’s ideas. The one thing I regret about the process was only making an edition of three of Motet.
LC: You could have sold more.
JC: Yeah, definitely, we could have sold more. (Laughs) But in talking about how works teach you a lot, we didn't really think about how it would make the speakers anthropomorphic. I love how sound and virtuality can create a physical presence, like a virtual person. We used that in other works later, like in Opera for a Small Room (2005) where one speaker creates our character. And we realized that technology is a safe place. People can go up to the speaker and feel intimate with the singer because they don't have to be standing next to an actual live singer. The audio speaker is invisible in ways.
It's also great for the artists now how easy this type of technology is compared to two decades ago. But sometimes having to figure out and jury-rig technology gives you ideas.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Marionette Maker, 2014, Mixed media installation including caravan, marionettes, robotics, audio, and lighting,14 minutes, looped, 184 x 222 x 130"
Courtesy the Artists and Luhring Augustine, NYC
LC: As much as these pieces required a technical feat, you seem drawn to these historic forms whether it's classic film noir, cabinets of curiosity, marionettes, dioramas, carousels. And you work with these old items, like the old-fashioned horn speaker to personify Janet with her dreams in Crows. Even the audio walks are like an elaborate radio play, right?
JC: Just wait until he sees the piece in our studio. It’s like the virtual theater set in the 50s or something. It’s like a radio play.
GBM: We haven't really set the date for that piece yet.
JC: There's been some criticism in terms of us being nostalgic, but what we like is how objects hold memory. It gives the whole historical context through the objects.
LC: Let’s talk about The Marionette Maker (2014). My read is that the wax figure Janet asleep in the camper is the dreamer and George, though not physically present, is essentially the marionette maker.
GBM: That piece started when we were working in Kassel [on FOREST (for a thousand years... (2012) for documenta 13]. We were looking at a lot of Grimm's fairy tales. We thought at one point we'd have that trailer in the forest. Then the marionette maker became its
own piece. It’s like Sleeping Beauty.
JC: I like the idea of an older Sleeping Beauty who doesn't age.
GBM: I'm not sure when we thought we should have a full-life person sleeping in the back.
JC: People are fascinated with that. They’re always touching the toes. They think it's somebody hired to lie there.
LC: She appears to be breathing.
JC: Yes, she is. We could have worked in carnivals!
GBM: We love fooling people a little bit, creeping them out. People get creeped out by her really badly. Some people won't even stay in the room with her.
JC: To produce her I went to Vancouver and got all molded and cast at this film prop company. They took pictures of my skin and everything. It was a big process. When we finally opened the crate in the studio, my assistant and I both screamed. Because it totally looked like I was dead in a box. But, yeah, George and I have different versions of the story because I see it also that she's dreaming this. I see it as a love affair between her and the marionette maker, too. A lot of our works are kind of referring to our relationship.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Poetry Machine, 2017, Interactive audio/mixed media installation including organ, speakers, carpet, computer and electronics,
Commissioned by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Koyanagi Gallery, Tokyo,
Courtesy the Artists and Luhring Augustine, NYC
LC: One piece here that I didn't expect to love is The Poetry Machine (2017). But you start interacting with it, creating your own collage of Leonard Cohen reading his poems, and it's amazing.
JC: Oh, my God, his voice is incredible!
GBM: We're so lucky to get those tapes, man.
JC: I love that piece.
GBM: And we got two pieces out of it because we thought originally we would have sounds to surround his voice and then we realized you don't need anything else. [The concept of sound clips became The Instrument of Troubled Dreams (2018).]
LC: Had you requested the recordings before he died?
GBM: No, we wanted to have recordings of all his early poems before he became famous. He became famous in ‘66 or something.
JC: Because George was always a fan, even from when he was like 18.
GBM: He was famous in Canada as a poet. He just couldn't make any money so then he decided maybe I'll try songwriting. We thought we'd find recordings but there weren't any of him doing all the poems. I was about to write him and ask if he would re-record some of his early poems for us and he died. But his manager said, well, we have these recordings.
LC: Speaking of a great voice, Janet, your voice has been a key part of your work. It's unusual for any contemporary artist.
GBM: Laurie Anderson maybe as well.
JC: Yeah, it is. It started because we change everything so much. If we had to have an actor come in and do it, then two days later we'll have changed it. So quite often the voices are George and myself. But I'm a terrible actor and sometimes I have to say something ten times. Then you discover different times of day your voice is better and worse. In the morning it's much lower and then at night it gets higher. Sometimes we record a new line but then the voice doesn't match at all.
LC: Did you do the dream sequences in Crows...
JC: Right from the bed. Sometimes in the middle of the night.
LC: Because it sounds groggy.
JC: We call it somnambulist theater, because when you're editing, my voice is very monotonous. And when we’re editing it it's like, we're both falling asleep!
LC: Let’s talk about your post-pandemic work. In the early months of Covid, your deadlines got pushed out so you had time to just play around in the studio. George, you were making ambient music, which ended up in Escape Room (2021) and Ambient Jukebox (2024). Janet, you were making sculptures and painting. Still, I was surprised to see paintings in your recent shows. Some had audio components but some not. You also have paintings displayed here.
JC: Those are the plein air paintings.
LC: But you’ve got watercolors, acrylic, oil paintings. Have you been painting all these years?
JC: Yes and no, it's something that came back during Covid. I use it as a mental health thing. If I'm depressed, and I go sit by the river and do some paintings, it makes me feel better. Then I started realizing with the little watercolor sets that you take anywhere that it’s a way to remember things. I have many small books full of watercolors and text, like a mnemonic device.
GBM: It’s a journalistic kind of thing.
JC: I have so many different characters [genres] when I paint. I've got a dark series from the studio that’s more filmic and some of those are shown in New York at the gallery. Then I have the plein air. Right now, I'm doing some abstractions. They're all over the place. That’s why audio works so well for me. I like to take different genres and collage them together.
I work obsessively on these paintings, then I don’t feel like doing any more in that style. What can I learn in this different style? It always amazes me when I see artists who've done the same thing their whole life because, I think, how do they do that? For me, it's not possible.
LC: That’s the amazing thing about being here and seeing all this work at once. It’s all extremely experiential but very different.
George Bures Miller, Janet Cardiff and Louis Corrigan, September 2025
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller live and work in British Columbia, Canada. The artists are internationally recognized for their immersive multimedia sound installations and their audio/video walks. Their work was featured as the Anozero Solo Show in 2025 at the Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova in Coimbra, Portugal. A major exhibition of their art was presented at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland in 2023 after launching at the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany in 2022. They have shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, Mexico (2019); Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (2018); 21st Century Museum, Kanazawa, Japan (2017); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark (2015); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2015); Menil Collection, Houston (2015); 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014); the Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013); and Documenta 13, Kassel (2012). In 2011 they received Germany’s Käthe Kollwitz Prize, and in 2001, represented Canada at the 49th Venice Biennale, for which they received the Premio Speciale and the Benesse Prize.
Louis Corrigan is an Atlanta-based writer. He previously served on the boards of several Atlanta non-profit arts organizations, continuing a family tradition of support for the city and its culture. His great-great-grandfather co-owned the city’s first bookstore and published its first city directory. His father served as one of the original staff members of Atlanta Magazine.