CARDIFF, Janet

Janet Cardiff is a Canadian sound and installation artist, born on 15 March 1957 in Brussels, Ontario. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Queen’s University in 1980 and a Master of Visual Arts from the University of Alberta in 1983. She lives and works in British Columbia.
Cardiff is internationally known for immersive sound installations and audio and video walks that combine recorded voices, music, environmental sounds, narrative and spatial movement. Using techniques such as binaural recording and multichannel audio, she creates works in which sound alters the listener’s perception of physical space and blurs the boundaries between recorded events and immediate reality. Many of her installations have been created in collaboration with the Canadian artist George Bures Miller.
Her best-known solo work, The Forty Part Motet (2001), is a forty-channel sound installation based on Thomas Tallis’s sixteenth-century motet Spem in alium. Each of the forty vocal parts is played through a separate loudspeaker, allowing visitors to move among the individual voices. Cardiff did not compose the music; her artistic contribution lies in its recording, spatial arrangement and transformation into an immersive sound sculpture. Her other works include The Whispering Room, The Missing Voice (Case Study B) and Her Long Black Hair. Collaborative works with Miller include The Paradise Institute, The Murder of Crows and FOREST (for a thousand years…).