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MA ADA 2009 > articles > Janet Cardiff, Orson Welles and Augmented Space

Janet Cardiff, Orson Welles and Augmented Space

May 10, 04:36 PM · Shelly Nadashi

In a previous blog I wrote about Augmented Spaces. I would like now to present Janet Cardiff’s work in relation to the notion of augmented space and in comparison to Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, which I’ve also discussed here before.

Cardiff is a sound artist famous for her audio walks in which she records herself and creates audio tracks especially for certain walking roots. Her audience is asked to wear headphones and to walk in a certain path while listening to an audio track.

Textist Janet Cardiff

The example of Cardiff’s work is applicable for the discussion about War of the Worlds because both hers and Welles’s work is essentially an audio work based upon a narrator’s voice and other sounds which give a sonic interpretation to physical reality. In both cases, a technological layer in being posed over physical reality.

However, while Cardiff is mostly targeting her work towards a specific audience of art consumers – she uses CD players as her audio projection devise – Welles used the radio as his projection devise, and he knew well that War of the Worlds will be consumed by a less sophisticated audience, which might not recognize the fact that this news broadcast was actually a theatrical piece (or an art piece). In this sense his work is experimenting more with the consequences of what might be caused by augmenting another layer of technology over physical reality. In other words, whilst Cardiff work is playing with the notion of augmented space within the safe environment of the art world – Wells’ work functioned in areas beyond this world and resembled more to a real social experiment.

 

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