Chapter 1 Pandemonium—Sensory Assault and Deprivation

From
2005 to 2007, Canadian artists Janet Cardiff (b. 1957) and George Bures Miller
(b. 1960) overwhelmed a cellblock at the Eastern State Penitentiary historic
site with sound. They automated a live performance of real noises made by
simple robots striking furniture detritus and pipes in the cells of this
abandoned prison, which had once specialized in enforced silence and isolation.
Ceramic toilets, iron bedsteads, and metal lightshades struck by screws and
drumsticks rang out treble while wooden cupboards and a dozen steel barrels hit
by felt-wrapped mallets resonated deep bass.[1] The looped composition
comprised fifteen-and-a-half minutes of rhythmic music followed by thirty
seconds inaction that framed environmental sounds. Beats emanated from cells up
and down the corridor as if generated by ghostly inhabitants. Unfolding in a progressive
narrative arc that accelerated to a thundering crescendo, the composition
structured an interplay of communicative tapping and seemingly random organic
noise, a call-and-response counterpoint of military-style demonstration and
ecstatic dance beat. Pandemonium was
also replete with pauses, discontinuities, and slippery sounds that resisted
signification. It included the reverberation of this unstable acoustic
environment, shaped as it was by atmospheric shifts and flows of visitors.[2] Pandemonium was a vigorous perceptual experience in continuous
flux.

This essay takes Pandemonium as its pivot point, examining through this one
complexly resonant artwork the intersection of sound art and documentary the
better to understand both fields of practice. In the first of this paper’s three
sections, I offer an account of Pandemonium’s
operations and relation to its site, Eastern State Penitentiary, which had
functioned as a prison from 1829 until 1971 and was by 2005 a museum about the
institution’s extraordinary place in American penal history. Renowned for its
Romantic architecture, radial layout, and above all its controversial system of
enforced silence and isolation, Eastern State Penitentiary presented an apt
context in which to interrogate sound and the effects of sensory assault and
deprivation on the individual and social body. Responding to these conditions, Cardiff
and Miller, a married couple and artistic collaborators, produced a musical
composition that oscillated between highly allusive sounds—conjuring an
illusion in the cellblock that occupants were communicating, congregating,
dancing, and rioting—and indeterminate, atmospheric sounds that continually
morphed and undermined this haunting narrative.[3]

What
little has been written about Pandemonium
presents the work as a clever reenactment of inmates’ real struggles to
communicate during the penitentiary’s silent years, an interpretation according
to which the artwork gives voice to former occupants and reactivates the prison’s
history. I propose instead that Pandemonium’s
peculiar mode of noise-making suspends the percipient in a rousing
middle space between narrative and noise. I ask what experiences of Eastern
State Penitentiary Pandemonium made
possible that other forms cannot and whether Pandemonium might function as a sonic documentary.

In addressing these questions, my project traces
a relationship between music and representation, sound and realism. In the
second section, this pursuit leads readers on an unusual art historical
trajectory as I consider representational strategies in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century music. Here I connect Pandemonium
with narrative programme music and avant-garde noise music that
foregrounded timbre, texture, percussion, as well as mechanically-produced sound,
immersive extremes of volume, and popular music’s intense appeals to the body
from blues to rock, punk, and techno. Sound is revealed throughout to be
inseparable from its affective and somatic functions, a force of emancipatory
promise and of violent threat with profound potential to mobilize bodies. Ultimately,
I position Pandemonium as exemplary
of sound art, a field of practices codified in the later twentieth century that
use sound as the physical and semantic material with which to investigate space
and the social configurations of bodies in environments.

In a third section, I consider sound art against
the “documentary turn” in contemporary art of the early 2000s that saw artists
looking for credible forms with which to represent real events and experiences
in all their subjective multiplicity. Taking Jeff Wall’s notion of “near
documentary” as a jumping off point, I locate a relationship for sound and
documentary in the radical sense of bodily proximity conjured by a binaural
field recording technique at the
heart of Cardiff’s audio walks. With a close examination of Words Drawn in Water (2005), an audio
walk produced roughly simultaneously with Pandemonium,
I argue that its hyperreal, three-dimensional binaural audio functions
analogously to trompe l’oeil painting
as delineated by Michael Leja.[4]
By conjuring biometric sounds of footsteps and breath, Words Drawn in Water triggers a sense of closeness in the
percipient’s body with that of Cardiff’s narrator, priming the user to be
susceptible to an intimate, sensory experience of the environment in question
and to the many concrete ways in which meditating sensorially on that
environment make its continuities and interconnections across history palpably
material. It is these embodied qualities of sound that I argue operates as a
form of documentary realism in Pandemonium.
At Eastern State Penitentiary, Cardiff and Miller triggered a sense of radical
proximity through sounds concretely of the cellblock. It was this visceral,
thickening of the relationship between the body and its environment that made
the percipient receptive to Cardiff and Miller’s onslaught of references to
noise music’s spectrum of potential. The percipient’s body was thus invited to
become a medium through which sensory relations at Eastern State Penitentiary
were felt to be material and present, alive and unresolved.

Much is at stake in this project. As a
temporary and intangible work of art organized ten years ago by an independent
curator at a site not primarily focused on art history, Pandemonium is vulnerable. My project sets out to preserve its
records as far as possible. Attending to Pandemonium
proposes an interpretation of Eastern State Penitentiary itself that is
rather different than the official narratives on offer by the site and its
historians. Pandemonium opens the
possibility that Eastern Site Penitentiary’s controversial system of sensory
deprivation is neither so remote nor quite so fixed and absolute as it can feel
in that imposing building. Rather than proposing to reactivate the
penitentiary’s history, Pandemonium
demonstrated that such administration of the body in society was in fact still
an open question and made a compelling case that this condition could elicit in
2005 as in 1829 a spiraling array of potential affects and responses. More
broadly, this project steps beyond easy categories of realism and abstraction,
exemplifying sound art as not some formalist abdication the social commitments
of the “documentary turn” but caught up too in interrogating conflicted truths
of memory, history, and politics. In an effort to better understand sound art’s
specific capabilities, I bring together English-language discourse that
understandsit loosely as a branch of experimental music with German-language
discourse that codifies more definitively its distinct spatial, sculptural, and
volumetric qualities while reorienting both to acknowledge sound’s tactile,
corporeal qualities. Sound art thus emerges as a medium in which processes of
sound, sight, space, and semantics collude both to function as and exceed documentary
representation. Writing about the multisensory experience of Pandemonium, finally, is an opportunity
thoroughly to reconsider the nature of aesthetic experience. There is no Pandemonium without urban planning,
religion, penal philosophy, architecture, music, player pianos, robotics,
psychoacoustics, atomic physics, and so on. Once we examine how this artwork
actually functioned, of what histories and materials it was made, Pandemonium appears undeniably to
conjugate sensory experience, to take sensory interdependence as its very subject.

Essential to my study is an imaginatively
proprioceptive approach to Pandemonium that
acknowledges its deliberate appeal to multiple senses and its investment in
affect as a mode of meaning-making.[5]
To borrow a phrase from Caroline Jones: “embodied experience through the senses
. . . is how we think.”[6]
Indeed, attending to the meaningful interplay of sensory experience in Pandemonium proves key to understanding
the work’s relationship to Eastern State Penitentiary, a place that worked to
reshape modern society precisely by segmenting and regimenting the senses.[7]
For this reason, I begin with an extended description of the artwork based on
my own close listening to an artist-authorized recording of Pandemonium on headphones during visits to Eastern State Penitentiary.
My description relies on installation photographs, interviews with the site’s
public programs director Sean Kelley and independent curator Julie Courtney,
and an invaluable account of the work by artist and project facilitator Richard
Torchia.[8]
This intermodal approach to Pandemonium
helps us to grasp the work as a full-bodied, somatic experience even while
acknowledging that it is, for that very reason, ultimately irretrievable.