Janet & Bures Miller, George Cardiff

This renowned Canadian duo's audio and video works and installations examine the complexity and vertiginous nature of subjectivity in a technological world, where man is caught between present and the loss of self, between memory and experience, perception and imagination. Cardiff and Miller create interactive pieces in which the visitor is invited to touch, listen, smell and move about freely. This new catalogue presents five of those works, including "Paradise Institute" and "The Forty-Part Motet," as well as three created within the last year, all documented in installation photographs and on a DVD. With an essay from art critic and historian Jorg Heiser.

Using existing elements in prison cells at the massive Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, sound artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller produced a percussive site-specific work that was rhythmic and musical at some points and at other times pure sound, as if made by the multitude of ghosts inhabiting the cells. Eastern State Penitentiary was the world's first true "penitentiary," designed to inspire profound regret--or penitence--in the hearts of criminals. Its influential design featured cell blocks extending like the spokes of a wheel so that each inmate lived in solitary confinement in a vaulted skylit cell. The artists chose Cell Block Seven, an enormous, cathedral-like, two-story wing completed in 1836 for their piece. It had never before been open to the public. Pandemonium documents this haunting and ephemeral work with color and black-and-white photographs and an audio CD, enclosed.