Canadian sound artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have developed a series of audio and video walks that occupy the disconnect between space as a lived phenomenon and a recorded map.

Within the work, visitors are invited to trace the same route that Cardiff herself had completed within a particular space (here, Alter Bahnhof in Germany), experiencing her own audio commentary and “live” video recordings through the space.

The work becomes complicated and provocative through its focus on time-based media within the diegetic world of the video. Cardiff brings the viewer’s attention to the ephemeral and fleeting live performance of buskers and ballerinas (which are unlikely present in the contemporaneous setting the viewer occupies) , just as she focuses on historic maps and encased documents within the site, which themselves make visible the lapse between past and present.

What else does this call to mind for you? What other examples are there of maps that exploit the potential of portable and new media?

Has anyone actually experienced one her and Miller’s “live” works before?

Read more about Cardiff and Miller here:

‘Pleasure Principals: The Art of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’, Border Crossings (2001)

An investigation of a physical installation by the duo, and Cardiff’s discussion of the “physical aspect of sound.”

‘Janet Cardiff by Atom Egoyan’, BOMB Magazine (2002)

An interview with Cardiff by the Canadian filmmaker.

Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller and the Power of Sound, The New York Times (2012)

A NYT profile on the artists and their personal and professional partnership.