The Project
Welcome to the digital companion to my master's 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. This site is designed to offer an informal and flexible reading experience, one that encourages browsing, jumping forward and back, and investigating for yourself across the wider web those subjects which interest you most. This site is above all an attempt to present sound art--a form meant to rouse multiple senses--in a format which extends opportunities wherever possible to listen and look and listen again.
As a paper, this project was conceived in three chapters. The first provides an overview of the artwork Pandemonium and its context at the Eastern State Penitentiary historic site, the oeuvre of its makers Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and existing critical literature. The second explores its relationship to sound art and the third to documentary-related practices in contemporary art. In this digital version, I've loosened the structure into shorter, thematic sections. The path below mirrors the sequence in which they were originally written to appear though they could just as well be read independently or in any order.