NARRATOR:  

Since the mid-1980s, Cardiff has created immersive, site specific multimedia experiences that blur the lines between sight and sound, perception and reality. The Telephone Call is Cardiff’s immersive audio and video walk through the Museum. Holding a camcorder and wearing stereo headphones, visitors follow Cardiff’s voice instructions as they move through the building, synchronizing their walk with the journey that plays on the camcorder screen. Janet Cardiff: 

CARDIFF: 

Well, it’s funny, the process of how you come onto an idea. I started doing the audio walks because of having this experience of— I was out doing some research in a cemetery, and I was just recording on my little Walkman. And I had headphones on. And I made a mistake and I pushed rewind when I meant to press play or stop or something like that. So it went behind. And then so I was trying to find myself, so I was playing it. And it was so weird hearing my voice describing what was around me, and my footsteps walking in the exact same site. And I’d never heard anything like this before. I just went: This is really uncanny.  

So then I decide: Well, I gotta use this. And at the same time, I was also experimenting with binaural audio, which is a system where you record with two microphones in the ears of a dummy head or in a headset on my own head. And what it does is it reproduces the sound three-dimensionally. It sort of reproduces the acoustic soundscape of the world. So combining those two, I got something I found was very interesting, recording binaural onsite, and replaying it in the same site. That kind of weird disjunction that happens when you’re in your living room and you’re playing around with the video camera, and then you replay it to see what happens.  

They’re slightly different. And you start to forget: What is the reality? Because you’re— you start moving your arms, too, in the same way, to line yourself up with the video image. That— I thought this whole process of how we’re so in tune with technology now that we— we slip into it so well, we become… Like, we— we’re like cyborgs, in a way, that we can sort of use the camera as an extension of ourselves, and— and get right into that world.