Sound and Documentary in Cardiff and Miller's Pandemonium Main Menu The Project Chapter 1: Pandemonium—Sensory Assault and Deprivation Chapter 2: Sound Art—Narrative and Noise Chapter 3: Documentary—“Waking the Dead” Conclusions: Pandemonium, Radical Proximity, and Protest Acknowledgments Bibliography All Media News + Updates

The Project

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From 2005 to 2007, Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller automated a live performance of simple robots striking furniture detritus and pipes in the cells of Eastern State Penitentiary, a Philadelphia prison that once specialized in isolation and silence. Oscillating between referential and abstract sounds, Pandemonium suspended percipients between narrative and noise. So far scholars have investigated only the work’s narrative aspects. This projects examines Cardiff and Miller’s specific use of percussive sounds to position Pandemonium in dialogue with noise music, sound art, and documentary-related practices in contemporary art. Pandemonium’s representational sounds coalesce into a curious kind of concrete documentary that triggered a sense of radical proximity between the percipient’s body and the resonant environment of Eastern State Penitentiary. In doing so, it explored the potential for sensory relations and collectivity in a complex, contemporary world. 

This digital publication is a companion to my MA Thesis "Sound and Documentary in Cardiff and Miller's 'Pandemonium,'" completed spring 2015 in  the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. 

Contents of this path:

  1. Chapter 1: Pandemonium—Sensory Assault and Deprivation
  2. Chapter 2: Sound Art—Narrative and Noise
  3. Chapter 3: Documentary—“Waking the Dead”
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Bibliography