Aural murder
The showstopper of the Biennale brings new meaning to 'surround sound' says Nick Dent
Bures Miller, co-creatror of audio installation 'The Murder of Crows'
"We like to emotionally manipulate people," says George Bures Miller. Not the first thing you'd expect to hear from a bespectacled, mild-mannered Canadian, but then there's no denying the visceral effect on visitors of the sound installation Bures Miller and his partner, Janet Cardiff, have created for the Biennale of Sydney.
Titled The Murder of Crows, the 30-minute work occupies the cavernous, unrenovated interior of Pier 2/3 in Walsh Bay. A hundred speakers are positioned on chairs and stands, a lone megaphone horn sits on a table. Visitors can take a seat among a forest of hi-fi; each speaker plays its own separate audio track.
Wind howls. A Soviet war march thunders, and unseen flocks flutter around the space - it's like being inside an orchestra pit that suddenly gets attacked by the airborne nasties of Hitchcock's The Birds. Cardiff's voice recounts a dream in which she finds a leg in her bed. "I know something terrible is going to happen," she warns, and the sound of the sea crashes in with biblical ferocity.
"One of the reasons we like using sound is it's a way of bypassing people's intellectual barriers," Bures Miller says. "A song can get into your being without blockage. I love going to a movie and it affects my being. We want art to do the same thing."
Bures Miller and Cardiff have been hailed as conceptual art visionaries for their narrative-driven multimedia work. Dividing their time between Berlin and British Columbia, the artists were approached by Sydney Biennale artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev to mount a new work. "We had this idea for a piece with a lot of speakers and she said, ‘I have this great space for a big piece.'
"The pier is perfect - the wood is warm, not too much reverb, so you can hear the voices and instruments and spatialise them. The hard part was trying to make the wind sound like it's moving through the space. There's not really the software to do it yet."
The largest work the duo has yet produced, Crows was partly inspired by a famous 1799 etching by Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters - of a man slumped at his desk while squadrons of owls and bats circle above. "The piece for us is a kind of sadness about the situation in the world today. It's like a requiem for our old optimism. Ten years ago, the world was a more optimistic place."
A Murder of Crows, Pier 2/3, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay, ‘til Sept 7.