Momentous Movement: Janet Cardiff's Audio Walk

Submitted by Rajdeep Sohal

August 2006

Towards the Completion of MA in Communication Studies Mc Gill University

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l. Abstract

1. Introduction 1

II. Chapter One: The Museum Audio Guide 3 Instructing the Visitor, Conditioning the Subject

l. Culturing Functions of the Museum 5 Il. Class Performance Il 111. Limited Levels of Control 15 iv. Continuous Relations 21 v. Designing the Exhibition 25 VI. Body Technique 28 Vll. Sound Space 35 Vlll. The Accelerated Subject 41

III. Chapter Two: The Audio Guide Undone 44 Sound and Reaction in Cardiff' s Missing Voice and Conspiracy Theory

i. Sound Matters 45 ii. The Audio Walk: audio guide + soundscape 46 111. Soundwalk: the soundscape in lived space 49 iv. Automatic Action: listening and hearing 52 v. Missing Voice: indexical sound, indexing experience 55 VI. Binaural Recording 57 vii. Conspiracy Theory: the space for surprise 59 viii. Back Space 63 IX. Urban Trajectories: can walking reinvent the city? 70 x. Actualized Virtuality 73

IV. Chapter Three: Momentous Movement 78 The Perceived Interval in the Audio Walk

l. Pre-conscious, Pre-individu al 79 ii. Sound Consciousness 80 111. The Ma( ve )ment 84 iv. Ready Constellations, Affirmative Potentialities 87

V. Conclusion 91

VI. Bibliography 96 • 1. Abstract

This thesis is an examination of sound and lived space in Janet Cardiff's audio walks, Missing Voice, and Conspiracy Theory. Its aim is to contextualize Cardiff's project in terms of how it reverses the logic of the convention al museum audio guide; taking the user on an unexpected tour of the back spaces, and by providing an audio track of soundscapes which are not about the art exhibition but rather point to the social relations constituted in each audio walk environment. Paradoxically, it is the non-synchronous elements of Cardiff's audio walks that point to the embedded nature of expectations produced by body technique. It is through the disjunction of the experiential moment between sensorial input and our awareness of it (an incongruent relationship between what is expected and what is experienced) that, Gilles Deleuze' s concept of the pre individual is actualized for the lived body. The actualized pre-indviduallies at the core of an analysis, of how Cardiff's audio walk transgresses the limits of a single art work and reopens living as an emergence for the interconnectedness of the actual-virtual.

Cette thèse étudie le son et l'espace vécu dans les promenades auditives de Janet Cardiff «Missing Voice» et «Conspiracy Theory». L'objectif est de contextualiser le projet de Cardiff dans des termes de subversion du traditionnel guide audio du musée. D'une part, Cardiff entraîne le visiteur sur un chemin inconnu, dans les coulisses du musée, et d'autre part elle propose un paysage auditif qui tend à montrer comment la perception s'appuie sur une relation congruente entre ce qui est vu et ce qui est entendu à un moment donné. Paradoxalement, c'est la non-congruence des divers éléments des promenades audio de Cardiff qui renvoie à la nature liée des attentes générées par la technique du corps. C'est au travers de la séparation de l'instant expérienciel en un stimulus et la prise de conscience de celui-ci que Gilles Deleuze actualise le concept de pré-individuel pour le corps sentant.

11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1 wish to express gratitude and appreciation to my thesis supervisor, Jonathan Sterne, who se enthusiasm for my project helped animate my imagination. Thank you to

Cornelius Borck for his helpful recommended readings.

Tom Lamarre and Anne McKnight have both inspired and challenged me throughout the years. AlI of my truly memorable learning experiences in school, 1 owe to them.

1 am very grateful to my supportive family - especially my parents who provided me with the privilege of education and the encouragement to pursue it this far. FinalIy, this work in-progress would have been unfathomable without the support and good cheer of my spirited alIy, Jarrett.

111 1. Introduction ln this thesis 1 map the significance of sound artist Janet Cardiff's audio walks. 1 examine two 'walks', Conspiracy Theory, and Missing Voice, which guide individual users through 'alternative' tours of the in-between spaces of the museum, and away from the art exhibitions themselves. Cardiff employs and exploits a simple technology, a pers on al audio device with audio tracks containing the artist' s directions for movement and, soundscapes, creating a complex augmented reality for the user. The audio walk's complexities are brought about by a virtual dimension that offsets the user' s perception of a scene, which the user sees unfold in front of her as it is being described by a narrator' s voice in the audio track. Cardiff' s audio walk makes chaotic a museum experience that museum audio guides attempt to organize. The audio walk operates by creating a slight disjunction between what the user he ars and sees, and expects and experiences from her environment and herself. While most virtual realities are about creating an alternate reality, Cardiff's audio walk creates an altered reality, and another level of the 'actual', by using sounds that the user would often hear in a given environ ment. The audio walk's success is determined by its ability to surprise the user, an effect which is only possible because the user already has a sense of 'knowing what to expect' or habitus. Cardiff's intervention deliberately destabilizes the museum machinery for its user while also complicating the status of the perceiving individu al.

ln the first chapter, 1 conduct an overview of criticalliterature on museums and consider the use of the conventional museum audio guide, a device that, in part, provides the artistic inspiration for Cardiff' s walk. 1 argue that the museum audio guide works alongside other exhibition rhetoric to fulfill the museum's educational and aesthetic aims,

1 and operates on different levels: narration (scripting), voice (phonogeny), movement

(walk-act), and space (anonymous and private). The audio guide acts as an educationai

'accelerant' that erases the need for its beholder to discover what she sees and hears on her own. The audio guide aiso conditions physical behavior, by encouraging smooth and processional movement through the bureaucratie space, while aiming the behoider' s intellectuai gaze at works of art.

In the second chapter, l examine Cardiff' s audio waIk, a diverging version of the museum's guide, that creates physicai and experientially jarring routes into the 'back spaces' in and around the confines of the museum space, where sounds from the recorded audio track are complicatedly interwoven with the user' s perception of her environ ment.

Cardiff disorients Iisteners by using 'typical' perception of sounds to present faise eues.

In effect, Cardiff displaces what is written onto the body and onto spaces and places in general: the misplaced or out-of place has an overall effect of disorienting displacement in the crisis that is the formation of the museum.

Finally, in the third chapter l attempt to read Cardiff's walks in terms of ontogenesis, or the ontology of becoming. l explore the smallest aspect of the user' s experience; an instant in which the user's body reacts to sensory stimulus before she is made aware of it. largue that this 'moment of movement' presents itself as embodied, as action before awareness and preceding individuation and consciousness. l propose that, in this respect, we are always la te for consciousness and, in this pre-conscious corporeality, the user actualizes the coherence of non-linear regions of living.

2 Chapter One: The Museum Audio Guide Instructing the Visitor, Conditioning the Subject

In looking at the museum on the one hand and its audio guide on the other, it is difficult to clearly state which entity strictly provides the machinery, and which entity structures the machinery. The desires and solutions to the problems of managing time, coordinating space, raising a cultured populace, and handling social expectations entailing communication in a shared environment, are co-constituted within the museum space. While there is truth in the notion that the audio guide provides a service for beholders, the service is complicated by a range of norm reproducing practices that go beyond merely advancing the agenda of a particular institution, but also point to the subtle strategies of even very simple uses of technology at work in regulating behavior.

Entities and their relations are continuous; it is not the object in and of itself, the audio guide unit in this case, which alone offers simple explanations for any historical paradigm. Rather, the audio guide is another object with which to discern patterns in a larger and more elaborate scheme that operates on reproductive networks of behavior and institutions that essentially reassure themselves through repetition and durability in the face of distributive effects. Both the museum itself and the audio guide lend themselves to strategies of control, command and modulation in terms of cliente le and cultural capital that it implies and in terms of its effects. As a more body-immediate form of exhibition rhetoric, the audio guide works on a relation inherent in the formation called the museum, in such a way as to transform discipline into control. The audio guide gets close to bodies: it occupies fidgeting hands, creates boundaries of anonymity and privacy, accelerates relations, and provides scripted commands for activity. In this chapter l explore the audio guide as a bureaucratic mechanism employed by museums in their aims

3 to educate the public. 1 1 situate my study on my experience of using a particular audio guide, known as the 'Guide-Man', at Musee d'art contemporain (MACM) in Montreal, where it is considered an accompaniment to the current permanent collection entitled,

'Place à la magie!', which will be updated in 2008. Effectively, my analysis endeavors to show how the tour of the tour is significant. By showing how the museum operates as a socially conditioning and regulatory space, 1 attempt to reveal how the audio guide provides the perfect vehicle to realize the museum's mandate of educating the willing public on, what it purports to be, the life-enhancing possibilities of experiencing art.

The audio guide - a device that usually exists in CD or simple MP3 format in a

2 pers on al and portable player - allows its solitary user, or beholder , to punch in an artwork's classification number in a museum exhibit in order to hear a corresponding description through headphones? The audio guide itself is a very simple device. 4

1 Though 1 have visited the museum numerous times without using an audio guide, in this chapter, 1 record my observations from my point of view of an audio guide user. Also, 1 am speaking specifically of my experience with the audio guide at Musee d'art comtemporain in Montreal where indicated, and in aIl other cases, 1 refer to the audio guide in general. 2 Jennifer Fischer uses the term "beholder" to denote a visitor who uses and listens to the audio guide, (a term that 1 too will employ in the same regard, since 1 wish to distinguish between those visitors who use the audio guide and those who do not). Jennifer Fisher, "Speeches of Display: Museum Acousticguides by Artists," in Jim Drobnick ed. AuraI Cultures (Toronto: YYZ Books, 2004). 3 It has been pointed out to me that indeed there are rare occasions where museums opt for audio guides with a single speaker (telephone-like) device instead ofheadphones, thus requiring that the user hold the earpiece to one of his or her ears when listening to a description. However, since the mon auraI device is far less common than the use of headphones, my study deals with the audio guides that operate with headphones. 4 Currently the technology around museum audio guides is being experimented with in several cities, and pilot projects. At MACM, for economical reasons, coordinators chose a simple MP3 format, durable, handheld device over flashier models that come with secondary functions. The simpler technology, described as "easy to use, solid and reliable", also appeals to the museum for the in-house programmability, allowing the museum to be "100% autonomous" while not having to pay for outsourced audio support. Though MACM will not consider a more technologically complex device until a reassessment in 2008, the year 2006 marks the largest leap into Podcast trials in museums; there is a new move toward hybrid digital audio players at other museums, significantly through the inclusion of Podcasting. However one of the greatest challenges to note here is the expense and risk factor of not only theft, "but the vendors, with their enormous stake in hardware and infrastructure .. .in an environment of constantly evolving technology." For a very interesting discussion with preliminary answers to the integration of new digital audio player see: Samis P. and Pau S., 'Artcasting' at SFMOMA: First-Year Lessons, Future Challenges for Museum Podcasters broad audience of use', in J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds.). Museums and the Web 2006:

4 However, an examination of how the museum employs the audio guide points to the very complex bureaucratic intentions of the institution which is, itself, a meeting point for government and culture. The audio guide is another tool for the museum, as part of exhibition rhetoric - along with catalogues, labels, and signage - to inscribe meaning on artworks themselves and on the experience of visitors, while subtly coordinating their behavior. It follows, then, that the intended use of the audio guide is two fold; one, to provide a private sonic accompaniment for the unsophisticated but interested visitor, and two, to convey a specific narrative of the museum and its role in producing bourgeois behavior. Though there are always differences between individual museums, the purpose of the audio guide does not deviate from the overall objectives of the museUffi. Curators employ the audio guide in the same way they do other forms of exhibition rhetoric; that is, to define what characteristics will be identified with an exhibit. The audio guide is read here, under the aesthetic and educational aims of the museum. 1 explore how, as a mobile and portable device that creates a private listening experience, the audio guide represents an inoffensive, efficient and effective way for the museum to achieve these goals.

i. Culturing Functions of the Museum

In the Birth of the Museum, Tony Bennett argues that the museum evolved from the need to educate and civilize an emerging middle-class on rules of social conduct and behavior in public, "culture - in so far as it referred to the habits, morals, manners and beliefs of the subordinate classes - was targeted as an object of government, as

Proceedings, Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, published March 1,2006 at http://www.archimuse.comlmw2006/papers/samis.html

5 something in need of both transformation and regulation.,,5 Once the most recent layers of the museum (the latest exhibit, the newest wing in the building etc.) are removed, what lies beneath are ideologies, hierarchies, and histories of bureaucratie power at work in politically motivated cultural production. As an ideological instrument, the museum is not simply for the pleasure and entertainment of the public, but also for their civilization or education on "the significance of art,,,6 an ultimately political and social project. Since governments remain attached to the notion that the welfare of the individual citizen is a reflection of the national state and its stride into modernity, Bennett argues, the museum serves the collective good of the state by providing a civilizing program designed for the raising of the population to a higher culturalleve1.7 The museum served a normalizing function, its projection of ideals represented what the state hoped its population would become.

Clearly, the museum defines art for the general public more than any other apparatus. This also means shaping what high art is in the first place, as weIl as deviating from it as an ideal altogether when it appropriately fits the museum's aims, financial, political, or otherwise. Nonetheless, the museum is the site where this particular educating program occurs. Yet, it is no longer necessarily high art, but still high art sensibilities, that the museum cultivates. High art sensibilities are qualified for their timeliness, framed by an acknowledgement or understanding of what is contemporarily relevant and why. Unsurprisingly, a variety of interests compete in making a case as to why a particular collection should be exhibited, a trend that points to what is at stake ideologically in the aesthetic educational programme of the museum. Interestingly, the

5 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 19. 6 Martin cited in Bennett 167. 7 Bennett, 6.

6 more recent 'blockbuster' corporate-sponsored exhibitions of the last two decades in major museums in the United States, have spun away from modernism and postmodernism in order to rehabilitate what Allan Wallach refers to as, in the case of the

Normal Rockwell collection at the Guggenheim in 2001, "bland patriotic myths of

American goodness and innocence."s These exhibitions rarely draw in large crowds who would not otherwise visit the museum. Instead, such sugary and easily digestible exhibitions depreciate the standard of high art sensibilities expected and performed by regulars. Blockbuster exhibitions amalgamate mass culture and commodity in the museum space, and are often treated by art and exhibition critics as a necessary iniquity to attract corporate sponsorship. However, when such mass culture forms 'pass' for art exhibitions, their meaning is changed as they are resuscitated from a subjugated existence through the museum's machinery, upheld by the same exhibition rhetoric used for 'high art' and defended and validated by the same curatorial persuasion-through-presentation.9

High art sensibilities are cultivated to reveal an ability to discern, between what is considered 'worthwhile' or 'what matters" and what falls out of that frame, a distinction

8 Andrew McClellan, "Norman Rockwell at the Guggenheim" in Andrew McClellan ed. Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 97-98. 9 The distinction between the broad-scoped major exhibition on the one hand, and the tailored, refined, or more exclusive art exhibition on the other hand, is one expression of a mode that is common to ail spheres of what we consider cultural events: that participation alone marks only one stage in a multitude of levels of communicating one's culturallevel. The music festival or annual one-to-three day event of concerts that take place is one such common illustration. Take for example, the Glastonbury music festival which takes place in the summer and caters to a broad audience of people who might consider themselves, "festival goers" but are more or less enthusiastic about any number of the bands playing at the festival rather than just one band in particular. The media-fortified festival for this concert-goer is a smorgasbord of activity and people, (several bands perform concurrently thus, preventing one from viewing every artist on the bill). The attendee of an ultra-exclusive and unpopular music festival however, exerts a higher level of culture or, interest in specialized subculture, by attending the event comprising non-radio-play and commercial musicians, inconveniently located in an isolated environment or little-known town, and recognized only by those "in-the-know." Not only are both festivals entirely different, but more importantly, their respective audiences would purport to attending the different festivals for very different reasons. Both festival-goers attend 'the experience' but it is precisely what it valued or practiced in 'the experience' that is so different. A certain degree of connoisseurship is at play here, wherein one's culturallevel is expressed through one's ability to distinguish oneself from the generality of the mass.

7 which is not necessarily brought about by a judgment of art based on the purely material or aesthetic merit of an artwork but, rather, one that points to the terrain (political, social, artistic and otherwise) on which the art is introduced. Thus, a specifie artwork's cultural and, in turn, financial value, is always assessed through relationality, through what it originally achieves in comparison to aIl that has passed in the same trajectory and against aIl that the art world imagined was possible but had yet to be actualized. The particular

'cultural value' of an artwork is determined by those who constitute the more formaI apparatus of 'the art world', notably critics, curators, art directors and, peripheraIly, the artists and buyers themselves. This paradigm matters critically in relation to the museum as it is the very institution which asserts and communicates artworks' cultural value to a broader audience, eventually shaping and validating what is to become appropriate as a

'sense for' what one should think, or how one should react to an artwork.

These high culture sensibilities were initially intended for the reformation of the middle class man who needed to be drawn away from less elite activities (such as tavern- going), and have since come to be applied to 'aIl corners.' 10 Thus, they also encompass what Hooper-Greenhill recognizes in her canonical text, Museums and the Shaping of

Knowledge to be the inclusion of certain masterpieces (intended to be understood by visitors as 'common sensical'), at the cost of exclu ding not only other objects but, more importantly, other ways of knowing, probing or seeing. As Hooper-Greenhill argues so effectively, the museum consists of contradictory functions: 'as an elite temple of the arts, and as a utilitarian instrument for democratic education,' 11 that reveals enduring tensions between aesthetic and narrative models of the exhibition. The resulting

10 Bennett, 31. Il Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, "The museum in the disciplinary society," in J. Pearce, Museum Studies in Material Culture (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989).

8 museum-going public is as much tailored by these exclusionary practices of high culture as it is influenced by them. The museum's visitors are a "public made up of formaI equals" 12 who, within the space of the museum, are distinguished by their cultural markers.

The museum purports itself to be culturally philanthropic, a public place in which knowledge of the arts is a benefit to be shared by aIl. Yet, it is important to note, as museum scholar Andrew McClellan does, "despite public declarations of public obligation, museums are often beholdento private interests and make little attempt to hi de their descent from private collections." 13 Thus full integration into the public sphere is always tempered with ties to prior aristocratic museum practices whereby the institution is dependent on "private patronage for financial support and gifts of art, and the need to reward those gifts with wall plaques and special events." McClellan also observes that most major museums are located in city centers and are less geographically accessible to those outside of a certain income bracket.

Given that that the museum is visited in leisure time, the visitor is aIready predisposed to having free time in the first place, and furthermore, is presupposed to having a desire to spend her free time looking at art - conditions which impact the demographic of paying clientele likely to voluntarily participate in such an endeavor. 14

Certainly, experts remain divided on the question of who visits the museum, but more recent visitor studies in the United States reveal that it is still dominantly the well-

12 Bennett, 104. Bennett stresses that although museum-visÎtor studies show that patrons are of varying income, occupation, and education backgrounds, many non-visitors report to choosing not to participate on the basis of a perceived cultural exclusion that what happens at the museum is not intended for them. 13 Andrew McCiellan "A Brief History of the Art Museum Public" in Andrew McClellan ed. Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 2. 14 Of course, it should be noted that man y museums offer discountedadmissions, particularly for seniors and groups.

9 educated who consider the co st and the experience of museum-going worthwhile for themselves and their children. 15 Going to the museum is a leisure activity chosen by the upwardly mobile middle c1ass and only, occasionally, by the 'downwardly' mobile who may try to hang on to cultural capital. Visitors have varying levels of cultural ownership due to education (or as the case may be, even a 'culturallevel of aspiration ,16) or upbringing in high culture, resulting in sorne feeling as though they belong, and others feeling inferior or exc1uded. The visitor that 1 have referred to thus far is a hypothetical

l7 entity based on ideal types implicit in the museum , but it correlates with the social makeup that comprises Bennett's assumed subject, and perhaps more importantly, the findings from Bourdieu and Darbel' s sociological report on the average visitor in The

Love of Art where Bourdieu proposes that 'habitus,' or one's social position, upbringing and milieu, largely determine one's attitudes toward culture. 18 Though the data presented in Darbel and Bourdieu' s 1969 survey of audiences is now somewhat dated, their

15 For more see John H. Falk, "Visitors: Who Does, Who Doesn't and Why," in Museum News (March April 1998), 38ff. 16 Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love ofArt: European Art Museums and Their Public, trans. C. Beattie and N. Merriman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 15. The authors argue that it is not necessarily one's education level in the strict sense (i.e. having obtained one's baccalaureat or not), but one's ascribing of a culturallevellegitimating his or her desire to visit the museum. 17 1 wish to note that here, 1 am informed by Foucault's assertion that analytic explorations should be guided not by questions of "what," so much as the material questions of how: "rather than asking what, in a given period, is regarded as sanity or insanity, as mental illness or normal behavior, 1 wanted to ask how these divisions are effected" (Foucault & Faubion, 2000, p. 224). Foucault's emphasis is on how social machinery is internalized and revealed in the smallest of practices. A shift in perspecti ve however, one that focuses on the minute practices themselves without considering the larger schemata, will only result in revealing practices as symptomatic effects alien of a structure, rather an integrated part of a system itself. See Michel Foucault and James D. Faubian, "Questions of method", in P. Rabinow ed. Power: Essential works of Foucault 1954-1984 (New York: The New Press, 2000). 18 McClellan, 38. From following the Boston school system that ensures that every fifth grader visits the Museum of Fine Arts, McClellan reveals that visitors may be drawn initially to the museum for varying reasons, including for example an elementary school trip, but wh ether a visitor will become a lifelong devotee and return regularly depends on his or her upbringing, indeed one's level of social distinction.

10 conclusion, that museum visiting is a form of cultural distinction, still holds today.19

Critically, both Bennett and Bourdieu identify the museum as a socially distinguishing place of performance for individuals with varying and competing cultural capital, including aesthetic education. One's social position appears in one's disposition and vice versa, the two are inseparable in praxis. The social make up of the museum-attending public is further staged at the level of the use of the audio guide.

ii. Class Performance

The audio guide is itself a tool in the performance of class, as a standardized device for those who either value cultural education or wish to appear to. As Bourdieu points out, an individu al claiming a higher culturallevel is capable of communicating her status even if her education was obtained through less official or unconventional means, such as self-instruction or schooling without eaming formaI qualification. Thus, education level is less of a meaningful indicator "where cultural practices and attitudes are concemed, than the culturallevel of aspiration.,,20 The audio guide is a mark of distinction amongst temporary peers, of an aesthetic education-in-progress. Seldom free of charge, the cost of renting audio guides for their one-time use deters a majority of vi si tors from renting them. Thus, by paying the audio guide rentaI fee at MACM, 1 already distinguish myself not only as somewhat of an anomaly but also from 'the generality of my own class.'21

19 The central and reoccurring c1aim in current museum-visitor studies tend to corroborate Bourdieu's prior conclusions that social distinction is determined on the basis of cultural and economic factors. See Pierre Bourdieu Distinction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). 20 Bourdieu and Darbel, 15. 21 Bourdieu and Darbel, 15.

11 Most museums designate one evening per week when visitors are not charged admission fees and, although this gesture is especially targeted at low-income visitors, a visit to the museum during this 'free' time evidences that this discount attracts the affluent frugal, rather than those who would otherwise attend but fail to because of their economic situation. A weekly free admission slot al one does not radically change the make up of museum visitors; the working class' relationship with culture is very different from the self-reflexive field of the cultivated class who se relationship to culture takes into consideration the whole of the intellectual condition.22 Unlike acquiring basic needs,

Bourdieu argues, "'cultural needs' as cultivated needs may increase as they are satisfied, since each new appropriation tends to increase mastery of the instruments of appropriation and hence the satisfactions accompanying a new appropriation," while deprivation of such art objects on the other hand, stems from a lack of education and unawareness of high culture-prescribed values, thus leaving the deprived "completely dispossessed of the means of appropriation of works of art," and therefore "dispossessed of an awareness of this dispossession." 23 Thus, those who participate in museum-going increase their cultural appetite while satisfying it, whereas non-museum goers are further alienated from culture values since they neither seek contact with it nor have an investment in its role in their lives. Moreover, since free admission evenings often constitute one of the museum' s busiest sets of hours, they have the effect of forming a temporary subculture, or at least an amalgamation, of high-culture-assuming individuals together in one space at one time, where there is pressure to acknowledge the 'see and be seen' factor linked to the presentation of one's cultural capital status.

22 Bourdieu and Darbel, 87. 23 Bourdieu and Darbel, 110.

12 Importantly, while there is often a day or a specifie time frame allotted for discounted admissionfees, there is sel dom a discount for the rentai of the audio guide, which is seen as an addition al service, one that is deemed extraneous to the needs or expectations of the majority of visitors from the 'general public'. Why, then, would one opt for the audio guide? What lies behind the museum's and the visitor's motivations?

The museum is a mark of modernity and rationalism is its most potent theoretical too1. Rationalism reveals itself through the museum' s intention to culture its visitors, an objective achieved through its exhibition tools. Krzystof Pomian's study of museum collections points out that visitors must have the cultural capital to 'see' what they are supposed to see, or more appropriately, the y must be able to probe the invisible meanings behind an artwork and how it has been arranged by the curator. 24 Pomian' s argument implies that the ability to properly query art is gained through a lifetime of formaI and informaI social training, displayed via projected competencies that take the form of a visitor' s behavior and manners in the museum. The audio guide is a possession of cultural capital that as an exhibition tool stands in for the power to 'see' or critically question and understand a work' s significance. As an accelerant, one that speeds up the process ofknowing an artwork's history and understanding its meaning in the mode that its educated critics typically would, the audio guide relieves the beholder of sorne of the burden of self-culturing. In the audio guide, the script itself, like the writing next to a painting, is a kind of social script for visitors, accelerating the educational process by advising them how to frame or interpret the artwork. Whereas the visitor may not have the time, patience, or desire to research a collection or particular artist by sifting through catalogues, books, and reviews, the audio guide helps the user get 'there' faster - and

24 Krzystof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities (Cambridge: Polit y Press, 1990).

13 'there' is a plateau where high art sensibilities are practiced and conditioned.

Accelerating the visitor' s know ledge base is an important part of the museum' s educational programme, and aIl forms of exhibition rhetoric are essential to the notion of efficiency, which is often read as progress.

If the term accelerant suggested that the audio guide could increase the pace or speed at which one cornes to be acquainted with an artwork' s significance, then the term would be most appropriate for the, albeit rare, scenarios in which the audio guide is used by someone for whom the exhibition rhetoric is itself the starting point in a particular aesthetic education. But what if the audio guide is not only an accelerant but also a starter, a launch pad for an individual into the world of art interpretation and appreciation? 1 present this situation in order to point out the ultimate paradox of the audio guide: on the one hand, the museum desires to appear to be culturally philanthropie

- by inviting the general public to discover, explore, interpret and freely bask in the joys of art and culture; but on the other, the audio guide interrupts this inquisitive and speculative process of 'doing the work' of interpretation for the beholder. The audio guide represents the museum' s impatience with the development of aesthetic education because it effectively short-circuits the beholder's own reflections and independent ruminations. Therefore, while the museum purports to introduce and invite the beholder to interpret freely, the audio guide actually interrupts this process by accelerating it. The contradiction inherent in the audio guide's relationship to the museum is perfectly illustrated through the absurdity of the following quote, earnestly delivered by the distinguished art photographer David Finn:

There is no right or wrong way to visit the museum. The most important rule you should keep in mind as you go through the front

14 door is to follow your instincts. Be prepared to find what excites you, to enjoy what delights your heart and mind, perhaps to have esthetic experiences you will ne ver forget. You have a feast in store for you and you should make the most of it. Stay as long or as short a time as you will, but do your best at aIl times to let the work of art speak directly to you with a minimum of interference or distraction.25

The above quote reveals that appearance is one thing and practice another. The museum purports to invite the reader to discover the text but it delineates the boundaries under which such interpretive explorations take place. By providing both the map within the map (the carefuIly laid out objects of contemplation within the museum space), implicit commands, and the device which interprets the artworks, the audio guide gets the visitor

'there' faster, but perhaps 'there' would have been an entirely different 'place' of imaginary space, defined by the visitor, if she attempted the journey completely on her own, and even if it were to bring about an 'incorrect interpretation.' Thus, it is evident that the script is produced in the form of exhibition rhetoric and the museum itself is a stage where "regulated social routines and performances take place." 26

iii. Limited Levels of Control

The audio guide acts as a sign of knowledge and intention. As an index of curatorial emphasis, the narrative heard on the guide is designed to create meaning through representation, and thus typically includes biographical detail about a particular artist in addition to anecdotes that historically and culturally position the artwork. The contextual framework provided by the device is executed with specifie euratorial objectives over which the beholder has very limited control. The curator considers what

25 David Finn. How to Visit a Museum. (City: Harry N. Abrams, 1985). 26 Bennett, i.

15 information to include or exclude, as weIl as its organization in the audio guide menu.

The curator maintains control in a hierarchical system that privileges the museum's point

of view, as articulated in the narrative, over that of the interpreting individual.

1 tested the audio guide to the permanent collection at MACM, a museum where

one curator constructs the audio guide's content and trains the traditional human docents,

thereby maintaining informational consistency throughout the museum's exhibition

rhetoric. The audio guide announcer occasionally references a historical or biographical

controversy raised by an artist's work, but most often provides the user with clean

resolutions, where commentary is presented as fact rather than hypothesis. At MACM,

the audio guide menu consists of four categories: 'bio', 'definitions', 'artist quote' (not

necessarily about the artwork itself), and (curator's interpretive) 'observation'. This

epistemological framework leaves little room for crossover of issues. The inevitable

'kinks', so to speak, that a visitor might otherwise come to realize (if she were to

independently research the artist or exhibition) are effectively 'ironed out' by the audio

guide, so that each succinct parcel of information in one of the four menu categories aims

to satisfy what the museum projects to be the visitor's most obvious and anticipated

questions.

Instead of further complicating an artwork's significance, the narration seeks to

fill 'obvious' crevices in the visitor's knowledge. The museum is interested in

'narrating'; it performs this ideological task, in part, through the presentation of its

collections. Its narratives are then further retold through other forms of text, such as the

audio guide, and finally represented by the artwork, whose author is absent, thus

requiring texts of explanation and description. It follows that, when attuned to the audio

.~ ..

16 guide, the beholder is likely to have her own reflections on an artwork bec orne influenced by the narrative. In this way, since no aesthetic judgrnent is ever neutral, the announcer heard on the audio guide can have the effect of, according to Fisher, "displacing the viewer's own inner dialogue and intuitive responses.'.27 This is not rnerely a Platonic cornplaint since it is obvious that visitors cannot directly query an object of art, such as a painting on a wall, rather, the beholder's own thoughts are layered with those of the announcer' s. Nevertheless, the beholder does not lose aIl of her sense or capability to critique artwork, and 1 wish to point out the extent to which the script influences (to whatever end) the beholder' s speculative mental process. Is Fisher correct to suggest that there is a dialogical effect at play with the audio guide? Let us examine my experience at

MACM, where, even when the announcer posed questions, it subsequently and smoothly answered thern. The issue is not that the audio guide' s own scripted response threatened me to perforrn 'correct' answers or offer reflections of my own (in a way perhaps, that it may with a live docent), but rather that the museum's customs and techniques for conditioning find, in the audio guide, yet another way to achieve their educational objectives. 1 am not asserting that the audio guide is merely a technologized replacement for the docent, 1 am instead suggesting that the regirnented audio guide script has more in common with other forms of museum rhetoric, such as the plates of written commentary which hang on the wall next to, or adjacent to, the artwork. The audio guide is an elaborated and uniquely sonic form of exhibition rhetoric that masks the relationships between the institution and the public, diluting them or mystifying them to appear as though they are only relationships between things rather than an apparatus of management. The audio guide is thus aligned with an aesthetic and education al

27 Fisher, 51.

17 objectives of the museum. As an extended version of wall labels and catalogues, the audio guide expands the text and does the showing and telling, rendering the visual experience alone, inadequate by comparison. Certainly the vigorous and inquisitive visitor (the one with the appropriate cultural capital to know how to query in the first place), will critically challenge the commentary heard, but quite often, the question is easily forgotten as the next, neatly framed, sound vignette provides the story of the artwork to follow - erasing the information that preceded it and effectively canceling the point of inquiry. The ease with which this pedagogie orientation is adapted by visitors, points to an epistemic desire that Pomian characterizes as a desire for knowledge of something secret, specialized, cultic and reserved exclusively for the culturally curiouS. 28

ln a space that presupposes the visual over auditory fields, the audio guide appears, at first glance, to offer visitors a somewhat more holistic approach to experiencing the museum - one that involves a more complete sensorial experience by specifically engaging with what an individu al visitor can hear through the use of the audio guide.29 However, before the notion of 'holistic' is prematurely celebrated, it is important to look at the level of control that the beholder exercises in manipulating the operation of the audio guide, and therefore its content. Since the invention of the acoustic guide in 1957, the device's technology has developed far beyond the cassette tape, thus having an impact on the level of the beholder' s control associated with the machine.

Indeed the beholder may influence the delivery (as in the order of play, and adjustment of

28 Pomian, 47. 29 Unsurprisingly, "holistic" refers to the deliberate, but regimented, inclusion of sound. However, ail the senses, save taste, are still evoked, albeit in unintentional ways: like any space, each museum will have its smell (detectable or not) and the sense oftouch is achieved by the ability to hold the audio guide and headphones, but of course, the artwork itself is not meant to be touched unless it is explicitly part of an installation, or interactive art. There are indeed sounds in the museum other than those in the audio guide, a point which 1 will address later on in this chapter.

18 volume for example), of the audio guide script itself. However, as the narrative is always biased and unchangeable, the beholder does not control the content of the audio guide script itself. At MACM, as a beholder, 1 did not have a selection of narratives or perspectives to choose from the audio script, thus 1 remained locked into the contentious narrative that 1 heard. 1 was stuck with 'the Museum', the dominant discourse.

Interestingly, 1 did assert my level of control with the audio guide when my 'cooperation' with the machine led to a distracted yet smoothly guided navigation of the space, perhaps as the museum intends and prefers, but also perhaps as my body does too, as it is accustomed to conforming quickly to the prescribed movements of a given cultural institution. Listening to the audio guide leads to a logic of steady movement, one that coordinates the speed or pace of walking through the exhibition, affecting how attentive the beholder becomes with the artworks described in the script. However, if 1 choose not to 'play' the game, if 1 fail to abide by the rules of the structured walk, then my full exertion of control (i.e. 'misplaying' the game) renders the device useless.

The primary purpose of the audio guide is to educate visitors, albeit by the museum's particular ideological stance, and the technology's design is not geared toward functions that would seem extraneous to this purpose. The tool would, therefore, not incIude the ability to tune through radio stations, or allow for aIternate or counter descriptions to that of the announcer' s principal narrative. The logic of the audio guide demands that the beholder listen to a narrative that correlates to the artwork that she is viewing at the same time. My description of the beholder's obedience and compliance in her interaction with the audio guide echoes a familiar socio-technical studies argument that accounts for the ways in which non-human entities influence social fabric so as to be

19 co-constitutive and continuous. Using brilliant examples like the simple technology of ,/~, the door doser or the weighted and cumbersome European hotel key, Bruno Latour

illustrates how non-human entities are actants themselves that hold society together,

make it durable, but also change it.

Latour' s formula for approaching the sociotechnical relationship is as follows:

"the force with which a speaker makes a statement is never enough, in the beginning, to

predict the path that the statement will follow. This path depends on what successive

listeners do with the statement.,,30 Latour points out that the 'statement' may mean a

word, an object, an apparatus or an institution. But he notes that is not linguistic and

refers, instead, to the "gradient that carries us from words to things and from things to

words.,,31 In the case of this paper, the 'statement' is the audio guide itself and the

museum is the 'speaker.' The chain of speakers has the potential to transform speakers

and their statements while reproducing predictable behavior in those who encounter the

technological object. 32 In Latour' s ex ample of the hotel key, he observes that if hotel

guests "conform to the manager' s wishes" by returning the weighted key to the front

desk, "it is not because the y read the sign" instructing them to do so, "nor because the y

are particularly well-mannered. It is because they cannot do otherwise. They don't even

think about it.,,33 As l pursue the transaction, as a beholder, l agree to abide by the audio

guide's implicit rules of participation; and l am likely to comply with the logical

30 Bruno Latour, "Technology is made durable" in John Law cd. A Soci%gy of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 103. 31 Latour, 106. 32 However, please note that 1 do not me an "technological" here in strict terms, since the fundamental operating principle in Latour's examples is that nothing is ever purely 'scientific,' 'technical' or even 'political' for that matter. Rather, these categories are always constructed because of the other categories, which, themselves are non-mutually exclusive nor independently-created. Thus, the point of view of the object and the point of view of the subject are complementary. 33 Latour, 105.

20 physical, visual and auditory sequence of art works, rather th an forcibly attempt to diverge or deviate from its intended use.

More specifically, the beholder is unlikely to randomly skip ahead to a narrative concerning the last exhibition piece while viewing the first piece, as doing so would render the rentaI of the audio guide irrelevant and its use to be non-sensical. In fact, the audio guide's limited functions (volume adjustment, skipping descriptions) act as, what

Latour calls, an "anti program," or a feature built into the non-human entity itself and considered by the speaker to control the sc ope of the human participant' s influence on the outcome of using the device. In this way, power is read not as a property of the device itself, but as an element of a chain that consists of social relations and technical mechanisms integrated as a whole in the same trajectory.

iv. Continuous Relations

If the relationship between the beholder and the machine is continuous, then the issue is not merely one concerning which object conquers which subject or vice versa, it is 'power,' itself, or rather discipline that is transformed into control. But the level of control that becomes the horizon is constantly negotiated by, as Latour would have it, ail speakers. Yet, sorne theorists have misinterpreted the interaction between the beholder and the machine, celebrating it as an instance of democratizing participation in the museum because the audio guide allows multiple visitors to tailor their experiences with the intimacy of a professional but solitary tour. This is essentially an argument about aura which Howard Caygill, in his analysis of Walter Benjamin's work, likens to ritual, calling it a "form of technology, a means of organizing and controlling the

21 environ ment. .. aura is not a property but an effect. .. beyond the sphere of art, indeed aura describes a particular form of experience appropriate to a particular culture and stage of development.,,34 But the form of experience takes place within a limited frame. In

Fisher's analysis, today's audio guides have surpassed the "linearity of cassette tours" and beholders are now permitted "to invent their own path" through the function of being able to skip, or replay, short tracks which act as vignettes to the exhibition?5 Fisher is correct to assert that there is a level of interaction between the beholder and the technology, but she is led astray when she proposes that audio guide technology allows for a fluid interactivity whereby the beholder can use the audio guide to create paths anew - fresh routes that drastically reinvent the experience of using the text (the audio guide) to interpret the exhibition.

Indeed, when the beholder mistakes her ability to physically interact with the device, scrolling through menus with varying levels of engaged attention and distraction,

she may experience an exaggerated sense of control. But the machine maintains a very low degree of variety in its functions over which the beholder might exercise control in the first place. Although beholders 'interact' with the technology, they do so only to the extent that it remains an object of the museum' s overriding discourse, that safely and correctly predicts its beholders will comply with the machine's intended use. The beholder is able to control simple functions such as playing order (at MACM mine was limited to adjusting volume and punching in display numbers), which is indeed

something, but this level of interactivity and control must be read within the logic of the

'exhibitionary complex'. According to Bennett, the museum does both the "showing and

34 Howard CaygiII, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998). 35 Fisher, 50.

22 telling" in ways that are strategically unobtrusive to visitors,36 and aims to be entertaining and pleasurable. Although artists, whose works are on display, might create art that is intended to be interactive and engaging, the museum generally aspires to create an overall experience that conforms and appeals to, meets, and reproduces the beholder' s expectations, and the voice of the announcer plays a key role in appealing to them.

The announcer' s voice is a cri tic al element in conveying the educational aims of the museum while managing movement and behavior. Since it must represent expertise in easily understood terms, those that the 'educated layman' of the museum public would understand, the voice of the announcer must be phonogenic or subscribe to a notion of phonogeny. For Michel Chion, phonogeny is defined as "the rather mysterious propensity of certain voices to sound good when recorded and played" thus providing an ideal substitution for "the sound's real source by means of another kind of presence.,,3? It is precisely this matter of "good," that is important in the case of the announcer's voice.

Chion argues that phonogeny was an important consideration in the twenties because of the recoding equipment's capacity to consistently mesh with the voice itself, so that only sorne voices would match the technology weIl enough to come across as 'good- sounding'. Further, he states that because of microphone and production quality today, the technology does not need to favor certain timbres over others since a great range of voices can now be captured clearly and, therefore, the industry does not demand the same

36 Bennett, 59-60. He argues that institutions of exhibition form a complex of disciplinary relations whose development is juxtaposed to (and not aligned with) the shift that Foucault points to in Discipline and Punish of what were previously public displays of power into internaI forms of incarceration. Bennett points out that the shift in the museum occurred in opposite order, whereby the display of objects once was once in very private domains and shared with only a select audience, the exhibition eventually became qui te open to the public, ail the while retaining a set of power relations. 37 Michel Chion, Audiovision, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 101.

23 exc1usivity that it once had?8 Essentially, Chion puts forth the notion that phonogeny is no longer a consideration. While this may be the case in film and television, it is not so with the audio guide. The announcer' s voice must fulfill the listener' s expectations. At

MACM, in both the audio guide in English, and the one in French, the announcer demonstrated impeccable diction, spoke c1early, authoritatively, and had no trace of an accent that would be considered 'ethnic' by the institution. That which constitutes 'good' or allowable sounds in the announcer's voice, works to keep the museum's curatorial framework in place. The announcer's voice must subtly engage the listener's attention without being noticed. In fact, there was nothing exceptional about the MACM announcer's voice precisely because it blended so effectively and discretely with the overall reflective and pedagogic atmosphere of the museum. At MACM, the recording was devoid of noticeable processing effects to make the announcer' s voice come across as unanimated, unaffected and neutral, although equalization and compression techniques were likely used to make the recorded voice sound 'right.'

Ironically, it is the unnatural and abstract voice that is deemed the most listenable.39 This feature points to the "listenability" or acceptability of certain

38 Chion's raises the question of phonogeny precisely in order to explore whether the phonogenic voice is less of a concern today than it was in the twenties bec au se of microphone technology alone, assuming that the notion ofthe photogenie image on the other hand, is still appropriate today. However, Chion's comparison of the term phonogenic to photogenie is not as clear eut as he presupposes; in the field of photography, particularly for magazine publication, there have been massive changes since the twenties where technological developments have affected the apparatus itself (manual to digital), and in production where software such as Photoshop, has allowed for the total transformation of images, and therefore is powerful in controlling its reception. Yet, Chion's concern is an important one that requires more theory and closer historiography. The theorization of the good image relates to the larger issue of photography's ontologie al instability in a way that is different from the good voice in audio recordings. The device itself, the camera or the microphone, "can never fully embody the practices and institutions of 'photography' nor can it ever be completely self-defining .. .it is al ways determined in part by larger structures of representation and knowledge." James Lastra, Sound Technology and American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modemity. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000),135. 39 For a discussion on whether this is indeed a contradiction see Rudolph Arneheim, Radio, trans. Margaret Ludwig, (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 198 - 203.

24 authoritative vocal qualities over others.40 The recorded voice must be clear and familiar enough to the listener's ears to warrant her participation, since the installation only operates successfully when she follows the narrator's directions.41 Even the announcer's voice plays a role in the museum's elitist project, highlighting the perfection with which the museum purports to represent a shared vision with its public.

v. Designing the Exhibition

The voice of the announcer is a professional companion that works ta direct the beholder, albeit under the façade of providing "insider" information that non-beholders inevitably miss out on by not paying the audio guide fee. The audio guide is not a replacement for the docent but it is possible that it may alleviate one's need ta join a guided tour where a docent walks alongside vi si tors and announces (often in hushed whispers) interpretations and information about art works, within a fixed schedule, consisting of physically close association with strangers. In 'sticking to the text' so to speak, at MACM, the unchanging script of the audio guide is confined to the scripted limits of a technology that leaves little room for chance and operates on a quickly learned logic of indications for behavior. At MACM, 1 put on the headphones, pressed 'play,' stood in front of the artwork, and listened to the announcer' s contextualization of an artwork until it was indicated, by a beeping tone, that 1 was to proceed to the next piece.

40 Susan Douglas, Listening in: Radio and the American Imagination fram Amos n'Andy and Edward R. Murraw ta Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern. (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1999), 132-135. The listenability of voice was a central factor in gender stereotyping radio in the twenties and thirties. In her study of radio listening of this era, Douglas points out that listeners did not want to hear female voices and offered as their reason that "men seemed more natural over the radio." Female voices on the other hand, were deemed as attractive and preferred for poetry, discussions ofpsychology, and passages of philosophy." (135). 41 See also Anne McKay, "Speaking Up: Voice Amplification and Women's Struggle for Public Expression" in Cheris Kramarae ed. Technology and Women 's Voices: Keeping in Touch. Cheris Kramarae, ed. (New York, NY: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988).

25 1 immediately understood, without literaI instructions on where to move or how to advance, what 1 needed to do in order to see the exhibit while accompanied by the audio guide. My knowledge of 'what to do' and the ease with which my movements assimilated the audio guide's instructions, point to how the museum is already a comfortable environment for me and, therefore, for other visitors who, like me, are familiar with the experience of ameliorating oneself with the appropriation of cultural goods. Thus, the museum creates the audio guide with the knowledge that its prospective users are likely those who already understand both how to use the device and, importantly, how to advance through the museum space. In part, the logic of the audio guide' suse is a conduit upholding bourgeois expectations of particular behavior: what a visitor is 'used to' through experience with other easily-assimilated forms of information and institutional instruction. The museum's signage for example, establishes certain codes of ethic and civility - the visitor is deterred from toting large bags, cumbersome jackets and from carrying a camera inside. By obeying the museum's rules, and understanding that other visitors will also follow suit, the individu al participates in the constitution of the very milieu which will, in turn, form and shape what she expects will come from it.

Rituals of the space, or practices, lie beneath the museum' s exhibitions and the constant change and overturn of even so-called 'permanent collections' . In Carol

Duncan' s useful analysis on the museum as a place of ritual, rather than as distinctive works or collections of objects, art environments are structured around ritual scenarios in the form of values and beliefs, such as class, that are in accord with culture outside, but

26 amplified under the lens of cultural elitism.42 Duncan's use of the term ritual expands on

Mary Douglas' definition whereby a "ritual provides a frame. The marked offtime or place alerts a special kind of expectancy.,,43 Like most ritual spaces that exist for aesthetic contemplation and education, museums are "reserved for a special quality of attention," where visitors "are expected to behave with a certain decorum.,,44 Rituals su ch as remaining quiet, not eating and drinking, and proceeding slowly through the museum space are quickly absorbed, 'learned' and enacted by patrons. Although the attending public remains divided on levels of comfort and impressions of inclusion in the museum experience, these rituals are reflected in aIl patrons' behavior, influencing ev en mobility in the museum.

The architectural programme and the administrative machine at the museum ensure regular and foreseeable behavior in space. The route through the museum is re- enforced by the audio guide and, suddenly, neither security guards nor museum empIoyees are required to usher behoiders to 'move aiong' and clear the space before a given piece. The beep, as part of the script, subtly manages movement of non-beholders as weIl. At MACM, as a beholder 1 stood before an artwork until its audio guide description was complete while non-beholders steered their movement around me, thus accommodating the regular flow of patrons through the space in a timely orderliness without interrupting me.

The audio guide is a subtle strategy that presents artwork in relationship to the physicallayout of the museum. As Bennett points out, the museum converts rooms into

42 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). 43 Duncan, 8. 44 Duncan, 10.

27 paths,45 and because the layout is unique, its navigation is novel and requires a kind of assigned logic. Museums are concerned not only with the organization of their collections, but also with the organization of their visitors. Curators create display room layouts that are smooth and appeal to visitors' sense of movement, presupposing visitors' value of control over surprise. In this way, the museum is interested in cultivating convention. Drawing upon Michel Foucault's notion ofhow government is traced in the emergence of new technologies that aim to regulate individuals' conduct46, the audio guide can be seen as a material tool for conditioning beholders, through a bureaucratie complex with prescribed methods of moving. The audio guide is a tool for regulating vi si tors ' physical conduct, and for directing movement in an organized fashion. Museums educate the public on the cultural significance of the art object itself and, at the same time, they provide a physical bourgeois education; incIuding how and where to walk, and haw ta listen.

vi. Body Technique

The beholder is not challenged to learn anew, or even reinvent, how to walk in the museum with the audio guide, since she already walks. The audio guide operates on the bourgeois visitor's capacity to constantly adapt her own body knowledge to cultural and environmental expectations and nuances. The valuable work of Marcel Mauss in the area of intention and interiority has shown that humans move through the world socially; and subjective experience is both conditioned and grounding. Mauss' tripartite method takes into consideration physieal, sociological, and psychological (by which he means culture)

45 Bennett, 44. 46 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London : Penguin Books, 1991).

28 aspects of experience. Every regularly performed physical activity is the product of history and culture: "we should realize that dancing in a partner' s arms is a product of modern European civilization, which demonstrates that things we find natural have a historical origin.,,47 It follows, then, that the body is interpreted as interface. Interestingly, it is through the observance and theorization of body techniques or, put simply, knowing how to use our bodies, that seemingly banal daily activities such as swimming and eating, illustrate for Mauss, a practical rather th an formallogic of experience. This notion of

'knowing' is key for Mauss's and subsequently Bourdieu's notion of habitus. 'Knowing' how to eat and walk, for example, involves a learning that is inherent forgetting, implying a bodily mastery so that attention has no longer much to do with the action itself. As

Mauss suggests, habitus is "the constant adaptation to a physical, mechanical, or chemical aim (e.g., when we drink) is pursued in a series of assembled actions, and assembled for the individual but by [herself al one but by aIl [her] education, by the whole society to which he belongs, in the place he occupies in it.,,48 Habitus is "embodied history," and a "spontaneity without consciousness or Will.,,49 Habitus allows the individual to act without having to calI upon consciousness every time the body acts its daily routines. It is as responsible to the body's ability for learning and inherent forgetting, as it is to society's functioning of individuals and institutions.

Taking theoretical cues from Norbert Elias and Mauss, Bourdieu's notion of habitus is useful in considering the integrated and involved techniques of the body, or the body's 'know-how'. Habitus is defined as the relationship between one's positions and

47 Marcel Mauss, "Body Techniques," trans. Ben Brewster in Sociology and Psychology: Essays (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 116. 48 Mauss, 105. 49 Bourdieu, 56.

29 dispositions and, as Bourdieu argues, it "tends to generate aIl the reasonable, common- sense behaviors which are possible within the limits of these regularities.,,50

Ethnomusicologist Shuhei Hosokawa applies this notion of organized movement to the act of walking, or the "walkact", noting in his insightful essay on the personal stereo as urban strategy, that walking is the most immediate and primitive corporeal medium for human transportation. 51 For Hosokawa, the walkact is an interpretive physical endeavor where walking, particularly in urban environments, is not just walking itself, but walking that consists of interpreting at the same time - through listening, touching, and seeing.

As mobility is inscribed into the design of the audio guide itself, it enables beholders to walk through the exhibition while listening to the announcer's narration.

The audio guide influences the walkact of the beholder and other visitors; the feet that shuffle in accordance with the sounding "beep" or tone that prompts beholders that a given artwork's description/explanation is complete, imply that the beholder should move on, progress, to the next ex hi bit. The beep, like that of the traditional film strip, acts as a signpost standing in for the 'go' we encounter in the green traffic light of the visible world. The beholder' s movement is organized and streamlined: she behaves according to the beeps as prompts for motion because she is accustomed to reacting rationally, and without much contemplation, to such signs in the urban environment. The audio guide is a behavior-managing instrument that reveals the "self-monitoring and self-regulation that the field of culture and modern forms of government most characteristically interrelate. ,,52

50 Bourdieu, 55. 51 Hosokawa, 175. 52 Bennett, 20.

30 The audio guide is temporalized to the extent that it manages space and time; its narration is intended to be heard in conjunction with the experience of viewing art on display, typically in subsequent order. While void of specifie movement-oriented directions such as wh ether to turn right or left, the announcer' s voice is a map that makes the interruptions between different works appear to be causal and unnoticeable. At

MACM, every time 1 punched a specifie code in the audio guide corresponding to an artwork on the wall, 1 listened, in varying order, to sorne or all of the artist' s biography, a description of the artwork, and quotations. Upon deciding that 1 had achieved a satisfactory background to contextualize each artwork, 1 advanced onto the next artwork, slowly progressing through the exhibition - with no alarms and no surprises. From the point of view of the institution, the efficiency of the 'service' provided by the machine is achieved through orderly and rational means. As with other bureaucratie institutions that

1 encounter on a regular basis (banks, libraries, etc), the museum maintains an implicit contractual agreement that presupposes that we, the institution and myself, will participate reciprocally and rationally. 1 therefore come to reproduce a prescribed set of behaviors that 1 continue to anticipate and expect from myself and from others. As the museum is a more or less familiar environment to me and, as 1 easily assimilate the logie of the audio guide, aIl of my expectations are met: from the hypnotic repetition of the announcer's informative yet authoritative voice to the clean sounding beeps signaling my procession and progress through the exhibit.

The audio guide makes connections through continuity, the voice and the beep, and between works in an exhibition, thus adhering to a progression of time that is

31 enhanced by the physical movement of passing stationary objects of gaze.53 At MACM, while an individual or even a group may c1uster around a particular piece, one was permitted to linger, but crowds that spend long durations of time congesting the space immediately around an artwork pose a problem to the efficiency and security of the space. With the presence of a crowd, the impersonalized forms of surveillance (two standby security guards at MACM) are alerted and poised to intervene and disaggregate the disordered bunch into a formation that is easier to monitor, thus enforcing a sense of progress and organization as patrons move through the exhibition.

According to Michael Bull, headphone use prevents users from being left alone with their thoughts. 54 The desire to be autonomous but not alone is fulfilled and negotiated by the audio guide because it ensures that once visitors, even those who visit the museum in solitude, press 'play', they no longer experience the art alone. This benefits not only the lonely beholder, but the one who desires ta be alone and left undisturbed, and articulates a desire for autonomy and sufficiency. Whereas 1 noticed that every beholder in MACM during my visit appeared to be there alone, there were many non-beholders who were joined by at least one other person. Although they may have shuffled through the exhibit at different speeds (which points to their pers on al selections regarding which artworks were worth lingering over), they stopped occasionally to discuss the works with one another in quiet tones. It is possible that being alone in a social environment, which is purported to be the nexus of intellect, art and

53 Typically, the privileged viewing point for art objects on walls is for the patron to stand directly in front of the piece. The museum therefore, must take note of anything that may interfere with the 'ideal' experience, such as glaring lights or obfuscating structures, such as oddly placed walls. For more on the patron's standpoint in relationship to the art object see Martin, "The Arts and the Between" in The British Journal ofAesthetics, 17, (1977), 22-36. 54 Bull, 51.

32 education, can leave patrons feeling lonely or self-conscious about their belonging. For

Bull, the audio guide provides a way for the beholder to retreat in public, a notion that is particularly interesting since the art museum itself is cast a kind of cultural retreat.

The audio guide provides a form of portable exhibition rhetoric in which an announcer acts as an intelligent companion who eloquently articulates what to look at, what to lookfor, and how to move. The announcer provides context and identifies the ideal time to spend with an artwork (perhaps pondering its significance) and, thereby, establishing how long one should spend in contemplative stance before moving on. The beholder is temporarily alleviated of responsibility, as though perfection were temporarily achievable through the sufficiency of the expert hear on the audio guide - making it possible to walk through a modern art museum while absorbing the educative tactics of refinement and without having to wait for pesky tour members to ask tedious questions.

The beholder is not necessarily alienated or detached from others so much as she is autonomous - a sonically, and self-regulating, independent agent. She is a "minimum, mobile and intelligent unit.,,55 Acting as a sign of knowledge and intention, the audio guide engages the autonomous beholder as a companion with whom one's attention is occupied.

As a device that is not only tangible but one that must be worn and held, the audio guide provides beholders with something 'to play with,' occupying the fidgety hands of the beholder. As a response to the threat of boredom, the audio guide gives the visitor

'something to do', albeit in a limited way, which begs the contentious question of whether or not museums are indeed boring - an oft considered inappropriate charge (at

55 Hosokawa, 167.

33 least in the social refinery that is the museum). Walter Benjamin points out the irony of the museum as a place of prescribed intellectual enrichment with astonishingly lackluster content: "the expressions of people moving about a picture gallery show ill-conceived disappointment that only pictures hang there."S6 The audio guide provides a path through boredom.

Benjamin provokes the differentiation between whether audio guides are tools to combat bore dom or simply to structure it. Perhaps boredom is, as Siegfried Kracauer points out, not a mark of failure but the necessary precondition for resisting perpetuaI distraction in an environment which cautions against irrationality: "one considers various projects that, for no reason, pretend to be serious. Eventually one becomes content to do nothing more than be with oneself, without knowing what one actually should be doing."S7 Whether the visitor is bored or not, the audio guide is a façade that contractually signifies the beholder to be more interested than non-users.

In addition to the audio guide as a mediating device that does the work of easing social tensions (unease, discomfort, sense of non-belonging etc.) for the autonomous visitor, the idea of sonic companionship seems also to handle the so-called modern tension between visual and auraI. "Modern museums in effect at once evoke the dream of possession and evacuate it."S8 For the visitor who urges to physically interact with artwork on the wall, the relatively lightweight portable device supplants and distracts this desire for contact. Patrons exercise moral restraint by not coming in to contact with or

56 Walter Benjamin, "One Way Street," in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings ed. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1,1913-1926, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 481. 57 Sigfried Kracauer, Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1995). 331-6. 58 Stephen Greenblatt, "Resonance and Wonder" in Bettina M. Carbonell ed. in Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 551.

34 purposely touching a painting, no matter how iconic its status, or how curious the visitor is to solve the mysteries of its textures and surfaces. The audio guide upholds the museum's logic that, except in the case of physically interactive installation art, the visceral experience of viewing art remains primarily visual rather than tangible. The donning of headphones and handling of the portable acoustic device, however, represents a modification of this unspoken rule that somewhat fulfills the desire for touch. Pie ne and

Russett posit that it is important to acknowledge the material features of art. They argue that viewing alone deprives the visitor of maximizing other sensorial experiences, reducing it to a "purely intellectual activity."S9

vii. Sound Space

A certain intimacy results from the close proximity of sound that is experienced with headphones, encapsulating one's ears and creating a private, sonorous world for the beholder. Physically, the audio guide headphones are always in closer proximity to the body than to any artwork on the wall, and they create a world of 'inside' between the beholder and the narrative. The scripted narrative, relaying its curatorial agenda, encompasses the ears - and the internaI auditory passageways - and engulfs the listener' s cognitive space. A sense of close proximity is built into the very structure of the medium itself.60 At MACM, despite the fact that there few other beholders in the exhibition rooms at the same time as myself, my experience was privileged, specialized, and guarded by a social and sonic wall between myself and others (patrons and staff) at the museum. The intimacy and immediacy of sound afforded by headphones makes the

59 OUo Piene and Robert Russett, "Sky, Scale and Technology in Art" in Leonardo, Vol. 19, No. 3. (1986), 194. 60 Bull, 25.

35 audio guide a powerful form of educating visitors. Michael Bull states that, for the ~ ..

personal stereo user, "sounds are as near to us as our thoughts,,,61 aligning with the notion

that sound inhabits the subject, and headphones diminish the distance between the sound

source and auditory receptors. As the beholder wears headphones, he or she is separated

not only in the auditory sense, but also in the physical and social sense, by spatial and

acoustic demarcations, as headphones not only cut off outside noise, they also keep 62 headphone sound out of the room, thereby separating the listener from other visitors.

Thus, headphones act as a veneer between the beholder and the outside world while they

build an inside and isolated world.

The personal and portable stereo has, for many, come to be understood as an

inevitable development of technology aimed at allowing the modern subject to assert

individuality and privacy, thereby maintaining control over inclusion/exclusion and

interior/exterior participation in what Benedict Anderson calls a "community of

anonymity.63 Our capacity to design new tools and techniques of communication has

drastically increased and yet modernity has also found corresponding ways for

individuals to become more alone and private. Privacy is privileged as a liberty in most

accounts of hearing.64 One of the hallmarks of the modern subject is the propriety of

private space, acoustic and otherwise.

61 Bull, 2. 62 Sterne, 87. It should also be noted that certainly, depending on the volume of the audio guide and the quality of the headphones used, the beholder may indeed over hear sounds from the room. Yet, as much as the beholder can 'tune out' so to speak, he or she is unlikely to be motivated to physically remove the headphones in the middle of an exhibit, even if the room volume decreases, thus continuing to territorialize his or her physical space by producing an impression of not being able to hear. 63 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (London and New York: Verso, 1991),35. 64 In "The Culture of the Telephone" Michele Martin discusses the economy of privacy as extant in social practices of ruling classes.

36 ln stating that the collectivized isolation of listeners is a strategy for containing I~ noise and "bringing acoustic order to a chaotic milieu," Sterne recognizes in Bull, how

the relationship between sound technologies and intimacy is too easily presumed, and

perhaps more importantly, taken for granted. Headphone use exaggerates the effect of the

realism of sound and emphasizes the notion that the ear is always vulnerably 'open',

unable to block external input in the same way that one's eyelid can be closed to keep

from perceiving visible stimulus. Yet, the beholder of the audio guide, or the urban

dweller with her 'earbuds' for that matter, may also choose not to pay discrete attention

to sounds heard in the headphones.

The use of headphones (or earbuds) continues to play a key role in the personal

use of audio devices, while the commercial technology surrounding personal audio

devices continues to develop, transform, and rapidly respond to the consumer industry by

offering hybridized features such as video and mobile phone use within the same object.

As 1 have indicated, it is difficult to generalize about how each beholder subjectively

experiences the information relayed in the audio guide. Unlike the personal stereo,

wherein each individual beholder chooses audio content that she wishes to listen to, sorne

of which may have sentimental or other emotional value for the beholder, the

message/content of the audio guide places speech at its forefront and fulfills the curator' s

mandate for the beholder to listen to a particular narrative about the exhibit that is

narrated by the museum.

One of the important effects of the audio guide is to produce a private acoustic

space for the listener. The prevalent appearance of headphone use in city sites suggests

the degree to which headphones are considered socially acceptable, ev en though they

37 cover the ear and block the user from verbal conversation with others. In Michael Bull's ethnographie study of personal stereo use, he interviews British commuters about their reasons for using headphones and many indicate that it is because the y are able to establish a zone of separateness. If, as Jonathan Sterne suggests, the field produced through a technicized listening becomes a personal space, then headphones would provide a means for asserting a private acoustic and social experience.65 The beholder contributes to an increased division of public space. In her historie al study of the telephone, Michele Martin points out that privacy is considered a liberty,66 and that for sorne, having to pay for it (i.e. the rentaI of the audio guide) is considered to be worth the expense.

The beholder performs differently th an other visitors because she is autonomous and in an individuated headphone experience. Whereas an accidentaI elbow nudge may warrant a polite apology, knowing that the beholder won't likely engage in dialogue results in other vi si tors granting the beholder more physical space. As Bull observes, the transformation is not merely one of public to private, but one in which the private is prioritized.67 The distance between bodies is determined by boundaries that politely afford adequate space to behQlders and recognize the separate worlds - private and public

- at play. 68 This distance is essential to the notion of the individu al' s internalization of the bureaucratie machinery in which social systems are produced and reproduced in

65 Sterne, 158. 66 Michele Martin, "The Culture of the Telephone" in Hello Central? (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), 142. 67 Bull, 79. 68 Sorne feminist scholars have argued that the technological process has produced an effect of increased isolation in everyday Iife. In pointing to ex amples of supposedly time-saving and labor-reducing household technologies such as the washing machine and sewing machine, Ruth Schwartz Cowan argues that third spaces of public congregation were c1osed, pulling women back into the privatized worlds of their homes and the seclusion of the suburbs. See Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology" from The Open Hearth to the Microwave, (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

38 69 social interaction . The museum's aim is to guide the individual, whom it places under the sign of modernity, as a knowledge seeker who finds learning pleasurable. As a result, the repertoire of techniques and conditioning assimilated by vi si tors points to the successful rhetoric and instruction programme of the museum.

The museum, like aIl modern public institutions, is invested in sound control.

Modern architecture is concerned with the reduction of sounds' isolation and absorption.

We see evidence of this in the thickness of the walls that divide rooms hosting installation art and in the height of ceilings. Moreover, the transmission of sounds from outside the building, such as those of traffic or weather, cannot disturb the internaI peace of the museum. From the acoustical materials that "fundamentally transform the auraI dimensions of the interior space,,,70 to predicting how visitors are likely to use the museum as they themselves sound-out through walking and standing, it is clear that the museum has its own sonic signatures. Although museums are often considered to be places of observance and quietude, audibly witnessing visitor traffic demonstrates that, effectively, there is no such thing as silence in the museum, where sound exists even as a function of space.71 Architects and builders must take into account how visitors' sounds as well as those of the material building will travel, reverberate, or be absorbed as they are dispersed through the lobbies, halls, corridors and exhibition rooms. These sounds affect the visitor' s experience from the moment of entry to exit. The museum space is in fact noisy; it is full of sounds, people and technology interacting in space.

The museum purports itself to be a place of reflection and attempts to uphold an impression of quiet. Installation art is one of the very few occasions when loudness is

69 Anthony Giddens, Constitution of Society, (Cambridge: Polit y Press, 1984),25. 70 Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 2002), 171. 71 John Cage, Silence (Cambridge: M.LT. Press, 1961).

39 allowed or planned within the museum. Curators manage this challenge by isolating works in separate display rooms, so as to prevent the bleeding of sounds between installations. However, even with non-installation art, where paintings merely hang on a wall, there is the noise of people who move around art works in order to view them better. Noises arise wherever information is produced,n and these interfere with the resulting sound environ ment. Headphone use highlights the ex te nt to which museums do not see their ex hi bits as having sonic components, though we know that they do.

In the audio guide, sound is aligned with the museum's educational aims while upholding its aesthetic expectations. The private listening experience afforded by headphone use signifies the museum's desire to find "an expedient accommodation - one that will bring happiness between the claim of the individu al and the cultural claims of the group,m. Interestingly, the noise bleed commonly overheard from audio guides, such as the sound oftransitional signais, beeps, and the announcer's muffled voice, are well- tolerated by non-beholders, underlining the significance of the "cultural symbolism of sound.,,74 On the one hand, tolerance of bleeding sounds points to a social acknowledgement and acceptance of the temporary culturally elite status ofbeholders.

On the other hand, the bleed further marks the bourgeois individual's assertion of private acoustic space.

The public art museum purports to be democratizing to the extent that is public, but the presence of loud sounds and disorderly conduct are not preferred, as they disrupt

72 John Mowitt, "The Sound of Music in the Era ofits Electronic Reproducibility," in R. Leppert and S. McClary ed. Music and Society: The Politics of Composition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987),193. 73 Gergen, 96. 74 Karin Bijsterveld, "The Diabolical Symphony of the Mechanical Age: Technology and Symbolism of Sound in Europeans and North American Noise Abatement Campaigns, 1900-40" in Michael Bull and Les Black eds., Auditory Culture Reader (New York: Berg, 2003), 168.

40 the museum's bourgeois prescription for quiet in its space of reflection. The museum maintains the bourgeois demarcation of sonically semi-private worlds and ensures acoustic and social order in a public milieu comprised of strangers by denouncing audible speech and, effectively, aIl sounds uncommon to the expected museum scene where visitors quietly observe art. The sounds of people in deep thought or reflection in a museum are similar to those at a solemn event in a church; they are predominantly sounds of slow physical movement: whispers, coughs, shuffling feet. Hypothetically, it would be relatively easy for the museum to institute audible speakers next to (or in lieu of), the explanatory labels and plates that are typically mounted next to artworks on a wall. Imagine that by simply pressing a button on the wall, as is the case in science and child-oriented museums, multiple patrons could collectively hear narration and sounds that are otherwise privileged for audio guide beholders. As this would pose a challenge to the construction and defense of the highly rational museum space, however, sound is only allotted to the private, sonic sphere within which it exerCÎses the museum's mandate. The museum space would be totally transformed if publicly audible components were added to it; and this would present a potentially non-orderly, and perhaps an even more intersubjectively enriching, experience for visitors. As 1 demonstrate in the next chapter, we see the beginnings of this movement between boundaries in the case of sound installation art.

viii. The Accelerated Subject

Tony Bennett's interest in arguing that the museum serves a regulatory function in conditioning individuals points to the crux of Foucault' s the ory of political apparatus. For

41 Foucault, obedience is not a gesture which is willingly offered on behalf of an individual to the society in which it exists but is a "sacrifice of the self, of the subject' s own will" in which "the self must constitute self through obedience.,,75 Giorgio Agamben summarizes

Foucault' s 'political double bind' as being "constituted by individualization and the simultaneous totalization of structures of modem power.,,76 For Agamben subjective technologies and poli tic al techniques are difficult to hold apart and converge into one another. In other words the political state holds at its centre the desire to regulate the naturallife of each citizen and this intention mixes with processes of subjectivization (an individual melding him or herself with an identity, consciousness, and even to an external power). Thus, for Agamben, "man is not only the object, but the subject of political power."n In the example of the audio guide, it is apparent how such distinctions have complex origins that ultimately result in distorting our reasons for turning to the use of a specifie technology in the first place, whether out of boredom, loneliness, aesthetic

'education', cultural capital, or body technique. The audio guide and the dependencies it has created (both for the museum and its visitors) are bound in the subject and how it relates to modem life, and considerations to what constitutes social and moral space.

The museum was once, and continues to be (albeit in different and less obvious forms), an instrument for the reformation of the popular body through a variety of 78 routines. It reproduces and guides "what features of human life are to be regarded as civilized,,,79 creating a common feeling of how subjects are to perform 'appropriately'.

75 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: a seminar with Michel Foucault in eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998),45. 76 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998),5. 77 Ibid 9. 78 Bennett, 99. 79 Gergen, 96.

42 For practical and theoretical reasons, the adoption and continued inclusion of the audio guide cannot merely be taken for granted as the inevitable addition of sound to yet another cultural environment. The audio guide provides as much, if not more, of a service to the museum, as it does for the beholder, where the audio guide is an effective means of conditioning uniformity. Paradoxically, the 'private enlightenment' promised by the museum is achieved by short-circuiting the visitor's own interpretive and contemplative processes; the audio guide effectively and efficiently accelerates the process of aesthetic learning by directing visitors acoustically (through the audio guide) and visually (with other exhibition rhetoric), thereby alleviating the visitor of the 'burden' of coming to her own hypothesis and conclusions about the art works. If this is the case, if the museum provides the 'right' interpretation to its visitor, and in a variety of forms

(plates on the wall, signage, and the audio guide), it would seem that the institution is unconcerned with cultivating individuals as creative thinkers and potential artists themselves. Democracy is upheld by a concept of subjectivity that masquerades as

'independent deliberation' and 'selfknowledge.' The audio guide programme is not really about individual, atomistic, and creative contemplation and interpretation. Instead, it is about a particular kind of educating, one whose programme is related to civilized modernity, whose institutions seek to "equip the self for full participation in the democratic forms of life. ,,80

80 Gergen, 100.

43 Chapter Two: The Audio Guide Undone Sound and Reaction in Cardiff's Missing Voice and Conspiracy Theory

ln the previous chapter, 1 attempted to establish how the audio guide operates as a regulatory function of the museum, however what happens when other similar and simple technology is used in such a way so as to disable the exhibition rhetoric? ln this chapter 1 examine how Janet Cardiff's unique twist on the traditional audio guide functions to completely change the user's museum experience by subverting the social project inherent to the bureaucratie space of the museum while opening up the field of perception to questions of how what we hear affects us. In order to break this discourse down, 1 look at two audio walks: Conspiracy Theory (Case Study B), which takes place primarily in the museum space, and Missing Voice, which happens in the streets of London. 1 will show how the audio walk's political realm is ignited by the very complication of how a familiar sound in a familiar environment, thrown off by time and space, can have the effect of turning in on itself; of causing the user81 to become aware of her disposition by having her expectations thwarted. Cardiff's walks are experiments in body technique that attempt to reveal what lies beneath a perceptual disruption. 1 argue that the complex nature of the user' s experience is brought about by a surprisingly simple technologie al apparatus that blends soundscapes and binaural recordings to produce an intersection of discourses on sound and everydayness.

81 Whereas in the first chapter, 1 rigorously used the term 'beholder' in my critique of tradition al museum audioguides,I shift to the term 'user' to identify the individual who uses Cardiff's audioguide. The terminological shift does not necessarily signify a greater involvement with the recording in the Cardiff case so much as it aligns with how the artist herself refers to the individual who participates in her audio walks. http://homepage.mac.com/wmcfar/cardiff.mov While Cardiffs employment of the term 'user' provides the warrant for my employment of the term, 1 also imply in the broader context of my thesis which, is so centrally concerned with developing an account of listening and subjecti vit y , the term 'user' suggests a more consumptive participatory role commonly referred to where installation art is concerned, for the physical and often multi-sensory participation required by the participant in order to attend to the art.

44 /~ 1 i. Sound Matters

During a typical stroll through the Chapet Hill neighborhood of London's East

End, anyone can expect to move through a blundering mirage of bodies and vehic1es, of

82 signs and surface. The world is audible : the urban landscape provides constant sonic

wallpaper, a container of varying volumes, indicating the action of people mixing with

their environment in what spatially surrounds them from every direction. The horizon is

not comprised of textures and depths of the visual realm alone, but of the auraI one too.

An movement of people in the city is accompanied by sound, and though we may not

react to what we hear in any kind of visibly obvious way, our bodies are always

processing sensory information. Whether we consciously calI upon our bodies to react to

the whirring blur of noise or not, they are always perceiving auditory input. The image of

a wincing baby whose mouth is agape brings about the expectation of a correlating

sound, a screaming cry. The hurried c1acking of heels on pavement during rush hour

matches up with the sight of a pair of shoes on someone's feet. Though this hectic city

scene seems to present a confusing and cacophonous mesh of sounds, for 'many, this

remains an 'ordinary' and regular experience. We become accustomed to the sounds that

accompany a given routine allowing, for example, us to cross an intersection in a loud

and busy urban zone, without much alarm.

In fact, it would prove a maddening listening experience to attempt to concentrate

on every sound separate from its background - to place concerted effort on isolating each

sliver of the spatial and temporal sonic panorama that every city space provides.

82 Atta1i, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985),3.

45 Effectively, the circus of sounds is the background of the busy city. From the clacks of wooden heels, shopping bag crinkles, barking dogs, meandering conversations, and mobile phone rings, to downpours of rain, gusts of wind, car engines and bicycle brakes, we recognize our cities in noise as much as we know them in sights and smeHs. But knowing that not every sound is intended to benchmark the course of one's behavior is a significant part of what navigating the city by foot is aH about. Sounds are also events; they are verbs full of activity - walking, talking, laughing and much else that we do on a regular basis - is bottled up in Cardiff' s audio tracks and presented as a soundscape that the user navigates.

ii. The Audio Walk: audio guide + soundscape

In Cardiff's works, an audio walk refers to an installation intended for one individu al at a time, in which the user, or the solitary participant of the installation, follows the simple instructions of a narrator' s recorded voice that is heard in playback through a set of headphones connected to a personal, portable stereo player. The recorded audio track, however, contains both narration (recorded directions provided in voice-over) and

'soundscapes' (sounds of the environment).

In the audio walks Missing Voice and Conspiracy Theory the user's assignment is to listen to and follow the narrator' s directions for movement, ('turn right here,' 'go up the stairs,' 'let's sit down,' 'read an excerpt from a detective nove! in the library' etc.).

She is encouraged to synch her movements to the narrator' s instructions by keeping pace with the tempo of the voices and sounds heard in the audio track. As both a participant and spectator in Cardiff's narrative play, the user experiences the audio walk as part of what Antonin Artaud calls "the chain of a rhythm in which the spectator used to see [her]

46 own reality in the spectacle", in this case, one in which the user is "allowed to identify

[herself] with the spectacle, breath by breath and beat by beat,,83. Cardiff' s walks are tailored site-specifically, so the user need not imagine a generic or abstract physical setting in order to appreciate the walks. Rather, the user is in the exact location that the narrator describes and where the audio tracks were originaIly recorded. The user therefore hears, listens t~, and sees many of the same things that the narrator describes.

The user' s ability to discern between recorded sounds and those that occur in 'reallife' is obscured because the audio tracks are experienced through headphones, which both block out external sounds and intensify internaI ones (those heard in the audio track), thereby creating instances which are at times as playful as they are perilous.

Whereas conventional museum audio guides provide clearly framed narratives of art that participate in an overarching aesthetic and educational programme84, Cardiff's audio walks are about everything but the artwork itself. Rer walks expose the museum's inner workings and offer the user an opportunity to explore spaces that would otherwise be hidden behind institution al codes of conditioned behavior and rationalism. In describing her audio walk, Cardiff states: "it doesn't tour you through the exhibit at aIl. 1 want it to be something that deals with the permanent architecture. So the shows will change but the architecture won't.,,85

83 Antonin Artaud., The Theater and Its Double. trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958),140. 84 As discussed in greater length in Chapter One, the conventional audio guide's purpose is to fulfill the institution' s own mandate of providing an aesthetic education to the public under the auspices of bourgeois conditioned behavior that marks the conduct of civil strangers amongst one another. 85 http://homepage.mac.com/wmcfar/cardiff.mov CKUT "Where's the Beat?" interview with Janet Cardiff, accessed in Spring 2006. Cardiff' s suggestion that the stability of the museum' s architecture willlast longer than the roving collections which circulate through it provides a powerful metaphor for the city as weIl; as much as there may be a combination of minor and major changes in a specific site, much about its physical infrastructure will remain more or less predictable within a decade (Cardiff's audio walks tend to be made available as part of a museum's permanent collection).

47 Both the museum audio guide and Cardiff' s audio walks operate as scripts - the former assumes that users will behave according to their social disposition (as it is generally performed in similar cultural spaces), and the latter highlights those body techniques (walking, hearing, listening etc) which are regularly masked because they are often experienced as 'second nature'. In the conventional audio guide, visitors find a source of exhibition rhetoric to accelerate knowledge about artwork while alleviating them of the burden of having to research and learn about the significance of the exhibit on their own. The process of using the museum audio guide operates on the user' s expectations of how to move through a monitored bourgeois space - one that is causal, progressive, orderlY and smooth. The audio guide is a tool for the visitor to navigate a museum space as seamlessly and unobtrusively as possible. Cardiff' s unique use of the saundscape, however, provides a vehic1e to disorder the museum audio tour's teleological movement through an exhibition. By 'cueing' the user's reactions through specifically narrated directions on how and where to move, and through her use of familiar, but spatially and temporally displaced, saundscapes that disrupt the user's expectations, Cardiff' s audio walks operate via a distracting script that points away from the art object and towards the world.

iii. Soundwalk: the soundscape in lived space

In Tuning afthe Warld, sound artist and pioneer R. Murray Schafer states, "A soundscape consists of events heard,,,s6 and thus, gives voice to an environ ment of objects and actions. A soundwalk is an exercise in attentive listening that caUs upon the

86 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundseape: Our Sonie Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1994),8.

48 listener/walker to pay close attention to what she hears: the volume, timbre, pitch, proximity, and source of sounds. Schafer differentiates between a listening walk and a soundwalk by asserting that the former is a leisurely activity in listening generally, whereas the soundwalk "is an exploration of the soundscape of a given area using a score as a guide. The score consists of a map, drawing the listener' s attention to unusual sounds and ambiances to be heard along the way."S7

Soundwalks reveal that "an inquiry into the auditory is also an inquiry into the invisible,,,88 since they elaborate the auditory dimension of surfaces. The purpose of soundwalks, as recorded by Schafer and his students at Simon Fraser University in the early seventies, was to cause participants to become acutely aware of sounds that they were not otherwise attuned to, or were accustomed to ignoring - the noisy climate created by products and processes of cultural industries at work, as they interrelate with

'natural' 89 or unmechanized aspects of urban life.

Schafer' s soundwalks expose listeners to an environ ment as it sounds itself out - both on its own, and when provoked or interacted with by humans. In his description of the soundwalk as a kind of sonÏc magnifier of the world, Schafer recounts that in one such walk participants were asked to "enter a store and to tap the tops of all tinned goods, thus turning the grocery store into a Caribbean steel band. In another, participants were asked to compare the pitches of drainpipes on a city street; in another, to sing tunes around the different harmonics of neon lights". 90 Captured by microphones, such

87 Schafer 213. 88 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio University Press), 51. 89 Richard Cullen Rath defines natural sounds as those which are unintentional and not made by humans. See Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), Il. 90 Schafer, 213.

49 isolations of sonie elements of the world are activities in acoustic ecology that draw attention to amplifications of natural environments as weIl. Soundwalks emphasize the redundancy of repetitive sounds heard but rarely listened to everyday, including sounds that accompany commerce, transport, and weather. As Don Ihde observes, the world is not only visualized, "we also hear surfaces.,,91

Claude Schryer defines the soundwalk as "a form of active participation in the soundscape. Though the variations are many, the essential purpose of a soundwalk is to encourage the participant to listen discriminately and moreover, to make a critical judgement about the sounds heard and their contribution to the balance or imbalances of the sonie environment.,,92 Schafer considers these 'imbalances' to have "unhealthy or inimieal aims" that he blames on technology.93 In Tuning of the World Schafer asks his reader to consider the sounds of one's daily routine - from home environment to daily commute - and he questions which sounds should be considered intrusive and whieh should be welcomed. Schafer states:

The home territory of soundscape studies will be the middle ground between science, society and the arts. From acoustics and psychoacoustics we will learn about the physical properties of sound and the way sound is interpreted by the human brain. From society we willlearn how man behaves with sounds and how sounds affect and change his behavior. From the arts we willlearn how man creates ideal soundscapes for that other life, the life of the imagination and psychie reflection.94

Schafer is both lauded and criticized for problematizing the tonality of modernity through sound ecology research primarily located in the field of the natural. His

91 Ihde, 67. 92 Claude Schryer in Barry Truax ed. The World Soundscape Project's Handbook ofAcoustic Ecology (Vancouver: A.R.C. Publications 1978), i. 93 Debra Sykes, "The Tuning of the World: The First International Conference on Acoustic Ecology" in Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 3 (1993), pp. 82-83 94 Schafer, 4.

50 contribution to sound art and scholarship is important in revealing that historiographie information is extractable from the way that something, somewhere or sometime sounds, that each time and place in the past has its own distinct sonic profile. However, the analytic dimension which Schafer caUs to the fore in soundwalk participation, assumes that the user's generallistening practices are rather refined. He suggests that 'learning how to listen' will provide salvation from the city: the loud and industrial machine that

"intoxicate[s] man everywhere with its incessant vibrations.,,95 The underlying theme of

Schafer' s writing entails a kind of humanistic and qualitative assessment of modernity that privileges hi-fi soundscapes, those in which "discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of the low ambient noise level.,,96

Shuhei Hosokawa criticizes Schafer for an overly romantic characterization of the now, as artificially noisy, which, focuses too narrowly on the 'natural' ideal of the human state. Hosokawa also suggests that Schafer' s soundwalk ignores the social aspects inherent to city sounds and therefore fails to appreciate sound at the level of praxis since not every individual enjoys, nor should she feel obliged to appreciate, the differences between the timbres and pitches of everyday sounds. Thus, Schafer assumes that 'regular people' are audiophiles as he "presupposes that the given soundscape in a city is potentially pleasant.,,97 Hosokawa's contention provides grounds for a major intervention, that Cardiff seizes in her audio walks; that is, what if the recorded rendering of a city, for example, reflects what the average pedestrian hears on a regular basis? What if this montage of familiar sounds were isolated in headphones while the user listened to

95 R. Murray Schafer, "The Music of the Environment" in Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner eds. Audioculture, (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), 33. 96 Ibid., p. 32. 97 Hosokawa, 174.

51 them and moved through the visual and physical world that produced them? What happens when this juxtaposition of a recording's soundscape - filled with noises common to a particular place - produces an effect of disruptiveness in ils recognizability?

Audio walks take advantage of Ihde's important observation that identifying things by sound is 'part of our ongoing ordinary experience,98. Cardiff's user need not be an 'expert on experience,' nor a connoisseur of sound, in order to appreciate the sonÎC dimension of everyday life. Cardiff removes the obscure, abstracted sounds (ie. the tap on the lid of a tin can) from Schafer' s concept of the soundscape and replaces them with sounds that the user would expect to find (ie. footsteps and traffic noises) in the environments in which her audio walks are set. The success of Cardiff's audio walks depends both on the user's expectations of how these environments will typically sound and on how effectively the recordings reflect the actual soundscape of a given milieu.

iv. Automatic Action: listening and hearing

To recall Mauss' argument, walking, like many body techniques, is a conditioned practice that becomes innate to the body - part of the body' s knowledge, its memory- because it is evoked so frequently, indeed on a regular basis by most humans. Thus, our ability to treat natural and technologized sounds automatically and without alarm is learned, and allows us to function 'normally', to 'get on with the day', or to walk relatively undisrupted. In this way, expectation of an event extends "beyond the mind and experience towards the future, relating the present to the past,,,99 allowing us to act accordingly. The sounds we are accustomed to ignoring, due to their ongoing presence in

98 Ihde, 59. 99 Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, (New York: Routledge, 2001), 82.

52 our lives (such as piercing car alarms or construction sites) would be debilitating if we had to listen for them all the time. But each sound in our lives does not require isolation and evaluation in order to be meaningful in a soundscape. Indeed, it would be nearly impossible to isolate every auditory input, regardless of its source or proximity, and to evaluate it with equal importance.

ln the same way that the wafting scent from a bakery signaIs that fresh goods are ready to sell, the scent does not intend that everyone within its radius modify their schedules in order to purchase a croissant, just as the thud of a door closing across the street does not dictate a change in a bystander' s actions. Sounds that are common to the urban landscape must be treated through a kind of automation so that daily tasks in life

(such as walking to work) are not completely destabilizing. The perception of sounds is something easily taken for granted. One cornes to 'identify' things by the sounds the y make and this ongoing process reflects our reactions, without necessarily alarming us.

Consider how often one hears a new mobile ring for the first time, while waiting in line at the grocery store or when riding public transportation. Because we have grown accustomed to the multiplicities of digitized sound, it can be accurately assumed that the jingle or pop song of a certain amplification, heard for twenty consecutive seconds, cornes from the mobile phone or another personal communication device. This process points to how even new sounds are constantly being assimilated, evaluated, and ignored by individuals on a regular basis. The audio walk does not replace elements of the urban soundscape so much as it displaces them - by drawing attention to a sonic environ ment that is normally experienced through automation.

53 Cardiff's audio walks point to the divide between what is heard and what is listened to. The rendering of 'hearing as passive' and 'listening as active' is, as Sterne points out, an inadequate and inaccurate distinction applied to how audio input is perceived by humans. "Listening is a directed, learned activity: it is a definite cultural practice. Listening requires hearing but is not simply reducible to hearing."lOO For Sterne, hearing is a physical and physiological activity, a form of receptivity that turns vibrations into perceptible sounds. Listening on the other hand is in part, a cultural construct, as well as the facility to detect, isolate and interpret subtle variations in a sonic environment. 101 To listen is to selectively focus on one sound over another. Therefore,

'multitasking,' as it refers to the ab ilit y to simultaneously pay equal attention to various elements of a soundscape, would seem impossible. Yet, listening and hearing must not be set against one another as a strict dichotomy: where there is listening there is hearing, but where there is hearing, there is not necessarily listening. Of course, one may be aware of, and hear multiple sounds but in the directedness of listening techniques, the scope of what is paid careful attention to becomes narrower than this broad reception.

v. Missing Voice: indexical sound, indexing experience

Missing Voice begins indoors at the White Chapellibrary and becomes an outdoor walking tour of an East London neighborhood. The work transforms an otherwise

100 Sterne, 19. 101 1 am careful to state that listening techniques are in part cultural, bec au se 1 do mean to suggest a universalism in which every single individual shares exactly the same trajectory leading to listening practices since they are also constituted by physical and psychological dimensions which will differ among people.

54 seemingly mundane walk into a rich sensorial experiment. The user moves from the library, past the public gardens, a church, through the Jewish Quarters, and is finally thrust into one of the bu siest tube stations, at Liverpool Street, where the audio walk ends. She may find, upon removing her headphones, that much of what she's just heard in the audio recording is present around her. The soundscape is full of noises that 'index' or reference the present situation in which the user finds herself.

Dore Bowen argues that the photograph is an icon and index consisting of resemblances and traces: "When the indexical relationship to the referent is suspended, the photograph becomes a questionable document." 102 The same can be said of a particular sound in a recording. In the case of Cardiff's audio walks, when the user hears a sound, the source of which he or she is uncertain - ev en if only momentarily - its nature, form and even existence are questioned. In order to frame, deduce meaning and thus, enact a rational behavior based on the sound heard, the user would first have to know the respective speaker (the sound source), time, and place of utterance. However because the se forms are not always given, the user is constantly on an experiential tightrope, found in a suspension of disbelief prompted by what sounds so realistic but does not appear in reality.

For example, while walking between seemingly empty stacks in the White Chapel library, the user suddenly 'hears whispers' though she thought she was alone. Surely, the sound of footsteps has been amplified, but where, when and how - in the audio track or in 'reallife'? It is difficult for the user to assess the true occurrence of the sound-event

102 Dore Bowen, "Hysteria and the helio-trope: on bodies, gender and the photograph" in Afterimage v. 26 no. 4 (January/February 1999) p. 13-16. See also Carl Plantinga, for the indexical nature of sound in (documentary) film, "What a Documentary Is, After AlI" in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism v. 63 no. 2 (Spring 2005) p. 105-17.

55 because the soundscapes in Cardiff's audio walks reflect how particular environments sound in reallife. These connections reveal "a very close existential relationship between the represented item and its representation."I03 But as Etienne-Jules Marey's early photographs of human movement suggest, representations can affect the ways in which a subject relates to herself. 104 Marey' s work established how photographs place representations of bodies between individuals and their bodies, producing an interconnectedness between subjectivity and objectivity that challenges the notion that a recording can stand in for itself.

Representation, therefore, should not be understood "as something of another order nor the condition of possibility of knowing things, but as the condition of possibility of things becoming epistemic things.,,105 Accordingly, sounds do not inherently 'mean' anything in and of themselves but gain meaning incrementally and relationally over time - they are ascribed meaning. Technically, the sounds in Cardiff's audio walk recordings are not exactly the same as the sources which they originally isolated. However, the extraction of these sounds and their re-placement in the audio track points out how the common amplifications of the modern soundscape are not naked, void of associative meaning, but rather laden with intention and exteriority which we

apply to them in order to further our own understandings of our environment. We see this patterned technique of listening applied everyday as we subconsciously register

certain sounds that we hear (those we deem as background) and treat through automation,

while others we listen to and listen for.

103 Altman, 41. 104 Etienne-Jules Marey Movement trans. Eric Pritchard, (London, Heinemann, 1895). 105 Hans-Ji:irg Rheinberger "Experimental Systems, Graphmetic Spaces," in Timothy Lenoir ed. Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and Materiality of Communication (Standord: Standford University Press, 1998), 300.

56 If there were sounds present in Cardiff' s audio tracks that failed to correlate with

what the user is accustomed to hearing in a certain environment (the sound of an airplane

landing in a library or the crashing of ocean waves in a city street), then the audio walk

wouldn't produce a believable sonic reality for the user. But Cardiff's goal is to cause

participants to reorient themselves in relationship to everyday sounds and she suggests

that "the main way the works interact with the public is through the intimacy that' s

involved." She achieves this intimacy by c10sely aligning the recorded soundscapes with

the user' s expectations of the environment. Cardiff uses binaural recording techniques to

create a believable alternate sonic reality that "replicates the way we hear,,106 and thereby

seems as real to the average listener as in reallife.

vi. Binaural Recording

Binaural, or stereophonie, audio recording is patterned on the dual hearing

process of the human ear and how humans hear. Cardiff uses this technique in

conjunction with multitrack recordings (sometimes as man y as thirty separate tracks are

recorded for a single audio walk) to produce a 3-D soundscape that appears 'natural' to

the listener when heard through headphones. 107 Using "a filter pair representing audio

eues from a specifie point in space to the left and right channels of headphones"I08 and

two identical mierophones, angled apart and recorded onto two separate tracks, Cardiff

produces a stereo sound image109 that results in added presence and dimension for the

106 Interview with Cardiff: http://homepage.mac.com/wmcfar/cardiff.mov 107 Adel Senki, Development of a Windows(TM) three-dimensional sound system using binaural technology, (University of Ottawa, 2000), 15. 108 Ibid i. 109 It is important to note as Steve Clark points out, there is often slippage between a listener's ability to I~ distinguish between mon auraI sound and stereo sound centered between the left and right channels Imagine a conversation between A, B, and C, for example. If A is placed to the

57 listener. She further employs the Omni technique, using a model head, which materializes the concept that human ears act like omnidirectional pickups whose polar pattern is influenced by the shape and size of the head and act as a mechanical equalizer to intricately filter mid to high frequencies. Cardiff's recordings are impressive simulations of how the participant would ordinarily hear her surroundings; they accurately reflect the shape, surface, and proximity of sounds. In her audio walks, the sounds of turning paper pages or the clearing of a throat are never flatly represented as equivalent in distance, timbre, or volume, but instead used to create a dioramic effect, of sound-as-event, that is staged physically all around the user.

vii. Conspiracy Theory: the space for surprise

In Conspiracy Theory, an audio walk that is a part of the permanent collection at MACM, the user begins in the comfortably predictable space of the museum lobby, but is eventually led into spaces that are reserved for its administrative purposes and normally not intended for visitors. The user picks up a headphone set connected to a portable

Left, B in the center, and C to the right, is there any material difference between a conversation recorded in stereo and one n which only B's lines have been replaced by a mono recording? ln both cases the amplitude of B 's voice would be evenly balanced between the two speakers, creating the effect of centering within a space conceived of as multidimensional, but which could easily slip into sounding like an unpositioned, monaural voice if the space were re-conceived of as non-stereo. Indeed Clark is correct in his assertion that monaural and binaural recordings may at times difficult for listeners to decipher but this is complicated by what David First points out in his study of the concept of binaural beats. First states "Binaural beats can be briefly described as auditory responses originating in each hemisphere of the brain that are caused by the interaction between two slightly detuned sine waves, divided between the left and right ears. When experienced through headphones, the interaction of the se signaIs is perceived directly within the brain as a pulse equal to the difference between the two original frequencies." (31). Thus, deciphering between two different signaIs is not merely an issue of carefully applied technique of listening but rather shows how listening also involves an unconscious level of response at the level of brain activity, affecting interpretation of the sound, whereby what is heard is perceived differently than its original source. See David First, "The Music of the Sphere: An Investigation into Asymptotic Harmonies, Brainwave Entrainment and the Earth as a Giant Bell" in Leonardo Music Journal v. 13 (2003) p. 31-7. See also Steve Clark, The Poetics of Terayama Shuji, doctoral dissertation: Yale University, 2005.

58 camcorder, and is given a "security access card" (the purpose for which the user is not informed). The audio track begins with Cardiff's voice as the narrator. The user's assignment in Conspiracy Theory follows a similar logic to the one in Missing Voice, except that in the former the user is instructed to look at the camcorder' s flip-out viewfinder while attempting to match her movement and pace with that which is featured in it. The images in the viewfinder reveal the same museum space as that in which the user is located. In one scene, the user is instructed to follow the gaze that appears on the viewfinder and, as the frame pans across the room, the user notices, in reality, the same row of red chairs that appears in the viewfinder. Then, when instructed to sit on one of the chairs, the user finds that the frame of the viewfinder screen lowers in synch with her own movements as she descends into the chair. Thus, the user experiences the audio walk from three different 'angles': as it appears before her eyes while she walks through it in reality, as it is described by the audio track, and as it appears on the camcorder's viewfinder. The audio walk thrusts the user into a psychological and physiological game of "forced observation" and "active experimentation.,,110 The user's preoccupation of matching the viewfinder with instructions, and sounds with their sources points to how the tenuous relation between what one expects from a given scenario is only possible because of habitus. On the theory of habitus Bourdieu states:

"The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively 'regulated' and 'regular' without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an expressive mastery of the operations necessary to attain them

110 Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. Henry Copley Greene (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927),27.

59 and, being aIl this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchcstrating action of a conductor."lll

Bourdieu's notion of habitus and how it relates to expectation is helpful in figuring out why 1 might tum around and react to the soundscaped voices and rustling movements heard in the audio track. He states, "The presence of the past in this kind of false anticipation of the future performed by the habitus is, paradoxically, most clearly seen when the sense of the probable future is belied and when dispositions ill-adjusted to the objective chances because of a hysteresis effect are negatively sanctioned because the environment they actually encounter is too different from the one to which they are objectively adjusted.,,112 Habitus is an ongoing shaping of individuals who in part, reproduce those structures and will share habitus with other social formations, groups and societies. In this way, "we are not 'in our very nature' discrete, bounded, self-identical creatures," but instead "assembled selves," in which aIl the private effects of psychological interiority are constituted by our linkage into public practices and tec h mques.. 113 E xpenence . "d··ISClp 1·mes man everyd ay, ,,114 tus,h we antIclpate.. h ow to act through body technique - in a probable environment or set of occurrences - based on what our bodies remember without our minds having to recall. To borrow a phrase from Nigel

Thrift, "remembering forward," becomes possible once expectation is understood as a set of body practices that rely on emotion. "It is impossible to imagine a moment without a context. There is always something about which has just happened that predicts what is

III Pierre Bourdieu, trans. Richard Nice. Outline of a Theory of Practice, (Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 1985),72. 112 Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice trans. Richard Nice. (Standford, Stanford University Press, 1990),62. 113 Nicholas Rose, "Assembling the Modern Self' in ed. Roy Porter Rewriting the Self: Histories From the Renaissance to the Present. (London; New York: Routledge, 1997), 228. 114Bernard, Il.

60 likely to happen - or not happen - next."IIS No matter what turn we take, we cannot escape expectation. The act of reading a newspaper in the middle of a busy train station versus reading it comfortably at home demonstrates that actions are determined by different sets of stimuli and different sets of corporeal practices, at once remembered by the body, and set into the potential future of actions.

Mauss, Brian Morris argues, reminds us of the inseparable corporeal dimension of daily activities, that "the body is a territory upon which a certain education and training

[can] be inscribed,,116. Mauss directs us to an understanding of bodies as sites of education and inscription for whom learned activities becomes automatic. The direction al aspect of the audio walk' s narration, for example, may point out the clunky awkwardness of 'walking in someone else's footsteps,' as the user tries to synchronize her movements with the pace of the track, but it cannot not 're-teach' the user to walk (by directing the user to first place heel on ground, then make contact with forefoot, while flexing knee etc). Thus embodied memory allows us to act without having to actively call upon deeply mental processes to intentionally 'remember' how to do things that are easily taken for granted, su ch as walking or listening. As Freud observes, "our mental apparatus has an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and lays down permanent - even though not unalterable - memory-traces of them.,,117

It is only because the user is a socialized individu al that the non-synchronous relationship between what is seen and what is heard in Cardiff' s audio walks results in an

115 Nigel Thrift, "Bare Life" in eds. Helen Thomas and Jamiliah Ahmed, Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 152. 116 Brian Morris, "What We Talk About When We Talk About 'Walking in the City'" in Cultural Studies v. 18 no. 5 (September 2004) p. 686. 117 Sigmund Freud, "A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad" in trans. James Strachey in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogwarth Press, 1995),228.

61 experientially disharmonious scenario. Herein lies a recurring notion woven throughout

Cardiff's walks: the everyday, or what is deemed as normal. In this way, 'normal' is absorbed into the fold of the ordinary, or that which occurs consistently and can be expected. The sounds of technological devices, for instance, are considered normal to the extent that one does not have to attentively isolate them and listen for them once the y have appeared with enough regularity in order to be taken for granted in the soundscape.

Common urbanized sounds in the context of a busy street in London - from beeping trucks to overhead air planes and traffic signaIs - are filtered through techniques of listening that involve automation, and these sounds are rendered to be normal before one

118 is consciously aware of their presence •

Cardiff's walks draw upon the ways in which everyday sounds and body technique through bureaucratic space are taken for granted rather than devised,

fragmented and examined by the user. In this way, Cardiff's intervention deliberately

destabilizes the museum machinery while complicating the status of the individual' s perceptual reality. As we shall see in the next section, which examines the relationship between sound and back space, many factors in the audio walk catch the user 'off guard'.

The mismatch between what the user sees and listens to corresponds to a disjunction between what the user experiences and expects. Ironically, it is the non-synchronous

elements of Cardiff' s audio walks that point to the very embedded nature of expectations

produced by conditioned behaviour, body technique, and social practice; revealing that

118 In my consideration ofhow technologized sounds are assimilated into our sonic expectations, 'normal' should not to be understood as 'inherent' but instead, as Georges Canguilhem suggests, that which "corresponds to the best compromise sought among several initially conflicting requirements." See Georges Canguihem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1991),238.

62 the familiar is where the uncanny lurks. By taking the user on an unexpected tour of the museum's back spaces, Cardiff is able to further articulate the experiential disjunction effected by habitus.

viii. Back Space

Missing Voice and Conspiracy Theory begin in the culturally administered spaces of the gallery and museum but, as the name "audio walk" implies, they involve the user walking through, and even exiting the very institutions considered the tradition al authorities on art experience. Cardiff's walks take place neither entirely inside nor outside of the museum, but rather the y connect these two spaces, exposing the internaI yet hidden organs of a museum. In Conspiracy Theory the user finds herself exploring the museum' s covered parking lot, an elevator, and an abandoned stairwell, rather than remaining in an exhibition or display room. The spaces of the institution that are generally considered to be 'negative' (i.e. abandoned, derelict, empty, non-public, unclean, unaestheticized) are, once inhabited by the user, overturned like a reversible

sweater - who se utility and appearance yield a transformation of the original.

Cardiff' s walks affirm otherwise negative spaces, making them positive and thereby challenging hierarchical orderings of the museum. Stephen Kern notes,

"'Positive negative space' implies that the background itself is a positive element, of equal importance with aIl others.,,119 Kern highlights the constitutive function of positive

negative space; hidden space in any institution is not an empty void but instead full and

active, undoing the sanctuaries of privilege, power, control and sacredness. In his work

119 Kern, Stephen. The Culture ofTime and Space 1880-1918, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 153.

63 entitled "Limits,,,12o Borges writes about the limitations inscribed upon every street, face, and landscape he has not seen, or has seen, but perhaps for the last time without knowing it. Borges establishes further in the piece, that for every new site of performativity, new patterns of behavior may be required - ones which the individu al may or may not have ever imagined or conceived of.

Cardiff's manipulation of the museum space (the 'storage' or physical and geographical container of the audio walk) offers a critique of the museum and the possibility to shatter the rigid notion heralded by Tony Bennet in The Birth of the

Museum that the visitor will necessarily absorb the apparatus' ideology and enact it through behavior. For Bennett, the museum, and any other institution for that matter, structures the routines of members of a population, and this does not magically disappear when the subject opts for methods that he or she deems to be alternative or resistant of the dominant system. Thus, Bennett suggests that the subject is always being 'worked on' by the institution, as part of a social project of reproduction and though the user may believe he or she is 'acting out', he or she is likely only reconstituting a prior order.

In Cardiff' s walks, the user' s inability to gain access to the performance and audience of the front space 'frees' her from having to perform accordingly while, paradoxically, it reveals how difficult it is to conceive ofbeing completely 'free' from one's social disposition. According to this theory of choice, the everyday is not made anew with every 'choice.' 'Choice,' Kierkegaard argues, is a rather deceptive thing

"since it is never about choosing one thing over another but the choice between choosing

120 lorges Luis Borges, "Limits" in Alexander Coleman ed. Selected Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1999),181.

64 and not choosing.,,121 In Kierkegaard's model, the dominant structure (society, or one of its apparatuses) produces a mode in which an individual submits to the act of choosing, thus remaining constrained to the world's play. However, an originally non-intention al or accidentaI deviance in the user' s action that produces a choice, operates outside of

Kierkegaard's dialectic model. As Cardiff's walks illustrate, the user's perceptual confusion and subjectivity-challenging encounters in the back spaces of the museum often create new experiences for the user, thus provoking 'choices' which are guided by the body as much as they are mental processes. Thus, though the social is omnipresent in the user's behavior, it does not follow that the user must behave in one way or another, or that the back space is necessarily so unmoving, dominant, whose administrative overtones cannot be overcome. And yet, because the audio walk allows the user to explore the non-exhibition places of the museum, there is a form of derailing the educational aims of the conventional museum audio guide.

Under normal gallery circumstances, art remains confined to obvious and marked out spaces, characterized by exhibition rhetoric (signage, displayed objects), and attention to interior design (uniformity of wall or floor colors, inoffensive and 'silent' lighting or heating/air conditioning). Of course installation art may also takes place outdoors where the framing of the work, be it in a park, or on a sidewalk for example, becomes a part of the constitution of the artwork itself. Whether art takes place outside or inside becomes integral to the way in which it is perceived and interpreted.

Galleries harness the ability to control as many aspects of establishing a particular frame as possible by going to extreme lengths to ensure that the presentation of the art object is optimal and effectively, subtly, and unobtrusively set in place by the rooms

\2\ Badiou, Il.

65 whieh host the art. A display room is eurated in sueh a way so as not to interfere with the artworks themselves and instead to provide a neutral baekdrop to the exhibition. But the baekdrop ean only be eonsidered aesthetieally 'neutral' since wh en it is eonsidered soeially, it provides a stage for the establishment ofunderlying performativity.

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday, sociologist Erving Goffman employs elaborate dramaturgical imagery to argue that identity is performative and comprised of front and back space. Goffman examines the mundane practices and meanings generated in human interactivity and he argues that the projection of certain character traits hold normative meaning contingent upon one's relation to an 'audience'. In a museum, front space is discernible by the "settings," "manners", and "customs" presented by its aetors and eonstituted by "that part of the individual's performance whieh regularly funetions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance." 122 But Cardiff' s walks are an exploration of back space whieh, aeeording to Goffman, laeks the audience that one finds in front space. Thus, the baek eomplicates the user' s status of belonging amongst others and eompeting for social advantage.

In Conspiracy Theory the user is led by the narrator to scan her security card in order to gain access to the third floor of the gallery where neither administrators nor visitors of art are to be found. Soon after, the user is instructed to push through a

Security Office door that reads "Staff Only" where black and white flickering surveillance screens are clearly visible, reminding the user of the regulated and monitored nature of the space. She is confronted with surveillance but a form which is far from

Foucault' s panopticon. Instead, the perceptual event opens the phantasm of discipline and

122 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 22.

66 regulation. The sign on the door indicates that this space is reserved and that the user is a trespasser, a deviant visitor who has strayed from the conventionally intended paths of the exhibition space. Perhaps she is surprised to find that the artist and the museum administration would plan for the user to wander alone, away from the bustle and crowd of other visitors into the empty, plain, and dusty hallway buzzing with fluorescent overhead lighting. It is evident that the back space is designated for operations of which the user is not a part and her realization of this could obstruct the user from 'knowing how to act.' As the heavy door thuds closed behind her, does the user wonder if any other visitors have witnessed her disappearing act, or whether administrators are suspicious of her actions?

The user's solitary walk is full of social considerations. Not only is the user keenly aware of other, possibly concealed back spa ces (whose existence is critical for the construction of the front space), but she may also wonder what kind of effect the back space and the user will have on one another as she navigates through an environment while it is described to her by the narrator's 'voice in her head'. As Freud argues, the first steps toward the reality principle reside in an exploration of what "belongs to the ego" and what "emanates from the outer world": "through deliberate action and direction of one's sensory activities and through suitable muscular action, one can differentiate between what is internaI. .. and what is external.,,123 In other words, the senses for the conscious subject are what, in part, create her contemplations and guide her behavior.

The audio walk suggests that the backdrop provided by the museum is itself social, not comprised of art works alone but by whole sets of institutional practices and human

123 Sigmund Freud, "Civilization and its Discontents" trans. James Strachey in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogwarth Press, 1995), 67.

67 interaction: other visitors milling around a work, individuals' whispered conversation, art school students hunched over sketch pads off to the side of a display. Each of these actions embodies an entire genealogy of social interaction and discipline.

Conspiracy Theory' s drawing of the user into the back spaces of the museum

(hallways, out-of-bounds zones) and of urbanism (alleyways, parking lots) results in a kind of 'overlapping' of public and private experience in which the individual acts based on her unavoidable and established habitus and, at the same time, she is confronted with the choice to act irrationally or otherwise. In the back space, the incongruency between what the user see and hears is exaggerated because she is in an unfamiliar place, where

"even an apparently private technique like introspection tums out to be very much a forum of social action.,,124 For ex ample , in the museum's off-bounds hallways the user is, technically speaking, alone, but in the audio track it sounds as though she may be accompanied: she hears a door sIam shut and the sound of sorne one approaching. The context of the safe front space of the display rooms - in which she knows herself in relation to others - suddenly becomes off-kiIter. There are no facial expressions of other visitors to be her mirror. It is not as though the user is in her living room at home, listening to the same audio track while sitting sedentary on a couch; rather, she listens to a site-specifie recording in solitude, in a place that is completely unfamiliar to museum visitors. At this juncture, the user is uncertain about what aspects of her experience are

'private' since she is, after aIl, in a 'public' building but in its back space - a weigh

station between the activity of commerce, consumption and cultural performativity of the front space. Thus, this portion of the walk raises a eomplex question regarding whether or

124 Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),23.

68 not the weigh station in Cardiff's walks is indeed as 'panoptically' sealed-tight as Bennett suggests, or whether the user's new circumstances offer, instead, the opportunity for a more co-constitutive space to exist in which the user could create new paths of experience. AH spaces are a combination of smooth and striated - both in the everyday front spaces and the backspaces exposed through art practices. The fact that the user is confronted with surveillance, through monitors and the use of a security access card in

Conspiracy Theory, pronounces the subjectivization of discipline. What is at stake in

Cardiff's walks then, is not only that an administrative space is undermined, but that the audio walk makes for a listening predicated on being scriptedllistened. TheoreticaHy, one needs to think in terms of an acoustic analog to the gaze but grounded in binaural simulation. Here, it is the relation between control and discipline constitutes an urgent site of analysis. The question becomes: to what extent does the user creatively consume the city and, further, what does this suggest regarding the limits of an unbounded subject who is left to her own devices in an improper place, a realm where expectation is a complicated construction?

ix. Urban Trajectories: can walking reinvent the city?

If we are to understand how cities are used by ordinary people in their everyday lives, we need to pay attention to the differentiated ways in which their relations to urban space are organized by the urban trajectories, maps and itineraries that arise from their differential relations to a range of economic, social and cultural associations and forms of life. Tony Bennett, Culture: A Reformer's Science, 181

Bennett's statement suggests that users can carve diverse paths in how they live in the city but that these formations are ultimately driven by institutional forces of life.

69 Bennett's assertions are accurate in so far as he understands the user's subjectivity to be grounding and, therefore, constructed through negation. However, if we begin with the premises that the user has subjectivity and that subjectivity is not reducible to 'external' forces alone (i.e. that it, ev en if only on rare occasions, can influence and affect the environment in which it acts), then there is the possibility to understand subjectivity as a positive construction, as a process of Becoming. In Brian Morris' analysis of Michel de

Certeau's theory of walking, he argues that subjects do not easily break societal structures but that the possibilities for urban subjects to invent new and heterogeneous assemblages that challenge their environments increase with the integration of virtual dimensions.

Morris suggests that lived affectedness - or embodiment of virtual and actuallife as interconnected aspects - relies on a user who is neither pre-reflexive nor pre-social, but asocial, because of "the storing and repetition of... past actions and contexts, their autonomie reactivation but not their completion.,,125

Michel de Certeau states in the influential The Practice of Everyday Life, that the act of walking in a city is a radicalizing form of enunciation in which the user improvises to "transform or abandon spatial elements,,126 altogether. Certeau's model is appealing to post-structuralists because it uses the conceptualization of the 'everyday' (rather than the extra-ordinary event) in order to stand apart from any universalizing model of subjectivity. Certeau's model is based on modest, intermittent and incremental

'enunciations.127 and suggests that in the repetition of everyday activities and events, there is infinite difference and that this difference is ripe with non-occurrence and

125 Morris, 690. 126 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S.F. Rendall, (Berkeley California: University of California Press, 1984), 98. 127 Ibid, 100.

70 differentiated reoccurrence in which opportunities for improvisation arise. "Daily life is scattered with marvels, a froth ... as dazzling as that of writers and artists. Lacking proper names, aIl kinds of language give birth to the se ephemeral celebrations that surge up, disappear, and return.,,128 In Cardiff's walks we see how the user creates new paths since no one walk can ever be produced in exactly the same way.

Walking is, for Certeau, one way in which the user can manipulate the spatial elements of a city. But the layers of soundscape, in Cardiff's audio walks, reveal how it is impossible to view an object from any one static and steady position. Understood another way, unity is never revealed to the subject but experienced as a series of discrete encounters. Just as subjects are not fixed, neither are the contexts in which they exist.

Cardiff's audio walks reject and resist dominant and intended pathways and challenge the user's sense of habit and the commonplace. The audio walk disaggregates the space traversed by the user while fragmenting her experience of the familiar - as when, in Missing Voice, the user is lead off the beaten path into the museum's back spaces (the alleyways, stacks of a library etc.). The audio walk manipulates 'place' by transforming it into a space that, in part, becomes definable by the user' s actions. The following passage from Luce Girard illuminates 'the trickster potential' of both the audio walk and its user:

"In ordinary culture, Certeau states, 'order is tricked by an art,' in other words, outsmarted and fooled; within the determinations of the institution "are thus insinuated styles of social exchange, technical invention, and moral resistance ... finding the way to "distinguish 'ways of operating,' to think about "styles of action",

128 Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural, trans. Tom Conley, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 142.

71 III· ot h er wor d S, to t h·eonze practlces.. ,,129

In this way, Certeau's philosophy can be applied to the junctures experienced by

Cardiff's user when she has the occasion to play, reciprocally, with positive negative back space and to create new physical and semiotic formations within them. The user is the site through which virtual states of becoming, and representational or 'real' states of being pass. She is able to challenge a particular space through 'tactics', a practice which

'spontaneously seize(s) opportunities,]30 based on creative timing.

Certeau does not suggest that the user must abandon her subjectivity altogether

(as ifthat were even possible in the museum). Rather, he suggests that subjectivity itself is in flux, as is the environment in which it exists. For Certeau, it is not just people who acquire a certain autonomy, but inanimate objects in the city too, such as derelict houses:

"They are witness to a history that, unlike that of museums or books, no longer has a language .... no longer 'pacified,' nor colonized by semantics - as if returned to their existence, wild, delinquent.,,131 In his view, the city and the user are "contingent and contextual assemblages," but where we see this most is not in everyday life as he suggests - neither when we purchase groceries, nor wait for a traffic light to turn green - but when actuallife is infused with the virtual. In Cardiff' s walks, the virtual creates a

"double movement of descent and ascent, from beings to Being, then from Beings to being,,,132 where the interval between these two modes allows for the subject to activate a virtual dimension of corporeality. These modes are part of an initiatory journey "where

129 Luce Girard in "History of a Research Project" in eds Michel de Certeau, Luce Girard and Pierre Mayol The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 2 Living and Cooking (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), xxii. 130 Practice of Everyday Life, xix. 131 Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard, "Ghosts in the City" in eds Michel de Certeau, Luce Girard and Pierre Mayol The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 2 Living and Cooking, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 135. 132 Badiou, Alain. 39

72 becoming itself becomes, and where one changes becoming depending on the 'hour' of the world ... the stages of a journey that sets scales, forms, and cries in variation" 133

x. Actualized Virtuality

"There's aIl these didactic tours that you can get in museums that say 'this is this' and 'this painting is about this,' they're giving their authoritative truth. Whereas l'm suggesting that perhaps reality isn't as stable and that its kind of a fun thing to play with." Janet Cardiff

In Heidegger's description of the broken hammer he suggests that when a hammer works, its utility is masked, and only when it breaks does its "thingness" become revealed

- "sticking out like a sore thumb.,,134 Cardiff's audio walks can be thought of as

(affirmatively) 'broken' audio guides which, in their rupturing of reality, point to the very

'thingness' of sound, perception, expectation and space, hidden behind the veneer of routine. We are used to the existence of sound in our daily lives and we rely on its presence to indicate information that affects how our subsequent behavior will unfold.

Cardiff uses relatively straightforward and simple technology to create a complex, virtual reality in which the 'real' becomes inseparable from the virtual.

The suggestion that virtual reality is able to construct a world indistinguishable from that which is external to the real, creates a polarization between artifice and kinetic potential. As Aden Evans suggests, however, this strict isolation of the real from the virtual resuIts in negation. 135 Cardiff' s audio walks illustrate how the actual and virtual, and the modes which they ordain, suggest a more complicated relation that functions not

133 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),249. 134 William B. Macomber, The Anatomy of Disillusion; Martin Heidegger's Notion of Truth, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 109. 135 Aden Evans, Practically Impossible: Deleuze and Ethics (PhD dissertation, 1999),47.

73 only metaphorically in sorne imagined world, but also in the lived and transformative instances the user experiences in the audio walk and otherwise.

For Deleuze, the virtual promises openings and the real grounds them in recognition. Through new concepts such as 'transcendental empiricism,' Deleuze offers an ethics that combines the "virtual multiplicity of the Idea," and the "actual world of individuals.,,136 However, he also suggests that the transgression occurs in the margins of the imaginary, or the philosophical. The realms of the actual and the virtual are interconnected in a feedback loop. In Cardiff's audio walks, we see what happens when the virtual is 'plugged' into actuallived experience, "where thought is jarred into action by virtue of the entirely unfamiliar" and 'where thought is forced to discover new ways of thinking, creating, and inventing.' 137

In the audio walk, Missing Voice, multiple 'realities' and perspectives exist: from the multi-tracked soundscapes heard in the audio track, and the world as the user 'sees' it

(and mentally computes visual stimulus), to the fragmented and fractured possible worlds that lie between and combine these realities, fusing past, present, and future. The instability between what the user experiences 'in her head' and 'in the real world' foregrounds their interdependence. Thus, the walk allows us to consider what experience belongs to the self and what is generated by the environment which, more generally, caBs

for a rethinking of the ethical relationship between the self and others. The walk is a

source for an infinitely differentiated improvisation that reveals corporeal and perceptual

136 Evans, 46. 137 Evans, 49.

74 multiplicities, demonstrating, as Spinoza states, "We do not even know of what a body is capable.,,138

Realities do not operate dialectically (real versus artifice) in the audio walk, but intertwine to such an extent that they bec orne continuous. As the user stands on a street corner listening to the narrator's description of what visually unfolds in real time - the building to the right, the men in suits walking past, the band playing on the sidewalk - she is drawn into a world in which she already exists, however, now with increased dimensionality. In this way, "the virtual is neither a ghost of the actual nor a transcendent that hovers ab ove it."I39 The virtual is actual by virtue of its existence, as Deleuze states,

"The virtual is real in so far as it is virtual.,,140

Cardiff' s audio walk is an actualized virtuality because it does not need anything added to it in order to become real - it is already another region of living, an exploration of presences and absences in a past which is present with the future of possibilities. The actual world does not precede simulation, but instead "there is an 'original' process of simulation.,,141 The user is not a privileged centre in this process but a flow of experiences, a site for perception and intensities. Thus, "instead of difference between things, we have a produced differentiation within something.,,142

The user participates (in the most active sense of the word), in a world to which she adds virtual elements, as she reacts to things that are not there, but which were there, at sorne point in the past, and which could occur, again, in the future. "The process of

138 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin with assistance of Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Zone Books, 1990),226. 139 Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 49. 140 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),208. 141 James Brusseau, Isolated Experiences: Gilles Deleuze and the Solitudes of Reversed Platonism (Albany, N.Y. : State University of New York Press, 1998),99. 142 Brusseau, 9.

75 actualization is about difference: it is the creative movement from the past unit y to the present multiplicity.,,143 The layering of past recorded sounds as they are heard by the user in the present, points to what Stephen Kem summarizes as a "repudiation of the past" in his look at James Joyce's Ulysses wherein "lives and histories (are) compressed into a single day via direct interior monologues.,,144 In Missing Voice, the user gains 'the ability to experience distant events,145 through the narrator's descriptions, which are similar enough to what she might encounter, but are affected by layers of the past.

The user takes a function (walking) to a certain limit (that which is inscribed as the 'everyday'), and transgresses that threshold when she actualizes the virtual potentiality of multiplicities activated and provoked through the audio walk. In order for the virtual to become actual, according to Michael Hardt, it must create its own terms of actualization. He states that, "while the real is the image and likeness of the possible that it realizes, the actual, on the other hand does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies.,,146 In Cardiff's walks there is a multiplicity of ways in which the user differentiallyexperiences and responds to the actualized-virtual reality in the audio walk.

Here, the user is noted as intensities, or the energy of difference itself, "not a mere physical force but a dimension of the idea, that which, within the idea, causes the virtual to pass into the actual.,,147

The reorganization of the subject, the space she inhabits, and the relations between these aspects, does not "simply erase and supplant oIder forms of mobility" and

143 Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ]993), 16. 144 Stephen Kern, Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, ] 983), 86. 145 Ibid 67. Kern argues that it is 'wireless communications' which allow for the ability to experience aspects of the pasto 146 Hardt, 17. 147 Bogue, 70.

76 behavior, it displaces them in creative ways.148 Cardiff's user is unconventionally provoked, through a mismatched perceptual experience, into refiguring her environment.

The need to reconfigure experience in ways that challenge, resist and reinvent older structures is not, as sorne theorists suggest, limited to the philosophical or imaginary realm. As McLuhan accurately notes, a subject lives confirmatory moments of uniqueness and authorship but, su ch occasions are increasingly rare.' Cardiffs work demonstrates ways of being and acting that can, even if only briefly, cause us to question how representations are developed, propagated, and reproduced when their displacement leaves us with heterogeneous mirages of the 'real.'

148 Morris, 692.

77 Chapter Three: Momentous Movement The Perceived Interval in the Audio Walk

The user is in an underground parking garage, standing, waiting, and listening to the audio track when suddenly a car screeches to a haIt. Or does it? The sound happens right in front of her, her heart jumps, and the feeling hits her 'in the gut.' She reacts instinctually; she is surprised. But the user immediately overcomes her confusion when she realizes that there is no actual car: no racing vehicle, no smoke dust, no crash, and no imminent danger. The source of the sound is in Cardiff' s pre-recorded audio track, not in the 'real' that surrounds the user. However, it takes the user a moment to become conscious of this fact - there is latency in her perception. In this chapter 1 examine this

49 moment - the half-second delay or nanosecondl - between the body's perception of an event and the subject's awareness of its occurrence. We are always late for consciousness. In this instance, albeit in an unmeasurable and invisible mo(ve)mentI50 in which the body is 'first on the scene' and consciousness is late to arrive, structures of anticipation and representation are undefined and absent, and the user is not bound to the representational state of Being. 1 argue that this moment of movement, or mo( ve )ment, is significant as a pre-conscious field of non-intentional time in which the user is prior to subject, or to borrow Deleuze's term, 'pre-individual.'

149 Nanosecond' and is characterized as a small unit of time that can be detected as a fraction of a second. See Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences, (Cambridge, Mass. ; London: MIT Press, 1999). 150 Cristina Degli-Esposti, "Federico Fellini' s Intervista or the Neo-Baroque Creativity of the Analysand on Screen," in Italica, Volume 73, Issue 2 (1996), 160.

78 i. Pre-conscious, Pre-individual

There are two modes that concern the individual in Cardiff's audio walks: the conscious subject, and the pre-conscious event or pre-individual. 'Consciousness depends on unification,' 151 or a coherent understanding of the ways in which signs and the signified relate, and how individuals ascribe meaning. The audio walk complicates the status of sounds that index the present and considerations of how they tend to 'mean' one thing or another for the user. Put another way, the audio walk functions based on the representation - the maintenance of an identity or "the reappearance of that which appeared before,,,152 - of sounds heard by the user on a regular basis. The walk can only work to fragment the user's experience by first producing what is a believable and plausible sonic reality for the user; that is, an auditory realm which tends to visually correspond with what the narrator describes, and therefore with what the user perceives.

Institutions cease to exist when there's no longer a habitus to support them. When framed by the audio track, each identity-specific sound featured in the walk (a gunshot, a door shutting closed), reveals how particular sounds become coded as univers al or commonplace. Soundscapes that index what the user is 'used to' hearing in a particular environment, such as the city street, establish another layer of 'the real' for the user and thus make moments of incongruence between what is heard and what is seen, unexpectedly jarring. When the user either hears one thing but sees another, or expects one thing and experiences another, she is surprised and, consequently, reacts. But it is less than an instant after the user experiences this confusion, that the world of

\5\ Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale; edited by Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 152 Paul Patton "Anti-Platonism and Art" in ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorethea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1994), 142.

79 consciousness cornes crashing in: framing the experience and transforming the user into a

'subject' who understands what is going on.

The rational world of identity requires that distinctions or judgments be made between the model and the copy. According to Deleuze, the problem with judgment is its opposition to innovation: "Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence."I53 Coming out of the confused moment, the user merges once again with a morally-motivated and common sense system of recognition that prompts her subsequent action and behavior. Thus, the one-to-one rationallogic of duality is easily dispelled in reality. A human's experience of physical pain, for example, demonstrates that the

Cartesian duality of 'mind versus body' does not hold, since the brain, negative stimulus, and emotion are so intricately enmeshed that neither the realm of the body nor the mind can fully 'escape' the other. In other words, as James Brusseau states, it is "illogical to state that there is mind and matter, the fact that there are, means there is one common existence"I54.

ii. Sound Consciousness

In Cardiff's audio walk, the narrator encourages the user to 'expect the unexpected', both mentally and physiologically, but how would such an orientation be possible? One cannot dismantle one's reactions prior to the emergence of an unpredicted event in the soundscape. When she steps into an elevator, or the staff lounge at the museum, the user's listening technique is hyper-sensitive to typical sounds, such as whispers and footsteps, and she experiences them differently than she would under

153 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D.W. Smith, (Minneapolis Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),135. 154 Brusseau, 95.

80 'usual' circumstances. The audio walk is therefore a phenomenological experiment that causes the user to question what it is to be sound-conscious of her surroundings and it highlights, through the audio track, those sounds which are normally treated through automation. When heard through headphones, the sound of whispering voices in the audio walk captures the user's attention and makes the user question the sound's source- has it occurred in the audio walk or in the 'real' environment? The subject has a tendency to calculate perceptually asymmetrical occurrences, allowing 'common sense' to rescue these unidentifiable incongruent moments and transform them into the intentional, the realm of the subject. However, 'common sense is based on a model of recognition, and an expression of perforrning society' s good will, which is the most general form of representation.' 155

The constructivist emphasis on the perceiving individual is central to phenomenology which first asserts the "facticity" of the perceiving body. This involves a description of experience as it is "lived in a world" and without the "psychological origin and the causal explanations which the scientist, the historian or the sociologist is most concerned with." 156 Maurice Merleau-Ponty' s strand of phenomenology is a departure from his predecessor Edmund Husserl whom, Merlau-Ponty accuses, allowed perception to be subsumed by all el se under the concepts of context and background. But as 1 discuss in the second chapter, how can an analysis of the user's experience define her concrete body (flesh) and consciousness (subjectivity) as the same thing and yet remain distinct from social considerations? Merleau-Ponty argues that mind and body become

155 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),131-33. 156 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1962), vii.

81 immediate to one another when they are considered together as 'human consciousness.'

He argues that phenomenology provides a non-dualistic approach toward embodied experience, in which 'empiricism (wherein ideas are effects of experience) and intellectualism (where philosophy loses sight of praxis) are regarded as poor models because, in one, consciousness is undervalued and, in the other, it is overvalued.

However, Merleau-Ponty contradicts himself by suggesting that that the body is important only in so far as it is conceived of as an intentional perception understood by the mind, the brain, or consciousness. Yet, because consciousness belongs to the realm of representation and recognition, it is social; and if it is social than it cannot be pre- individu al. As David Woodruff Smith points out, 'phenomenology alone does not tell us the place of consciousness in the world.' 157 The problem with phenomenology is that it places consciousness at the centre; and the body and the mind are treated as though they work together equally, thus, never permitting a break from subjectivity. In the same way that Euclidean geometry provides a Eurovision of measuring the world, phenomenology is accused of resurrecting the grounds on which categories of value can be claimed. To represent the world is to ground it; and, as Deleuze observes, 'grounding is the operation of sufficient reason and is thus about determining an image.' 158

'Once an experience is looked at subjectively, everything formalizes.' 159 The user becomes a site of inscription produced, in part, by the very social forces that she, in tum, constitutes. The user is bound to identity, representation, structures, techniques and practices that are ever present in her consciousness of circumstances. For this reason, the

157 David Woodruff Smith, Mind World: Essays in Phenomenology and Ontology. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), xi. 158 Difference and Repetition, 272. 159 James Brusseau, Isolated Experiences: Gilles Deleuze and the Solitudes of Reversed Platonism (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1998), Il.

82 subject's contemplations cannot provide the exclusive starting point from which to base understandings. Instead "we have to account for how the subject is formed through experience.,,160 Body technique draws upon the user's habitus and experience: the integrity of the flesh (body) and human behavior (subjectivity) in relation to expectation, anticipation and improvisation. Cardiff's audio walks indicate that phenomenology may be helpful to understanding the user' s experience in the time leading up ta and immediately fallawing the mo(ve)ment, but that the trajectories within which the user is caught are subsumed and territorialized by subjectivity and consciousness. AU understandings of the canscÎaus subject' s body are mediated through representations constructed through interpretative frameworks. Because Cardiff's audio walks work to derail the subject temporarily, causing the user to question her perceptions of the environment, the user' s concrete yet canscÎaus body cannot be discussed without being subject(ed) to determinate systems of power and knowledge which suggest that the body does not exist without discursivity. When the user is bound in consciousness, she is bound by subjectivity and, therefore, never without social considerations and constrictions.

In his Critique af Pure Reasan, Emmanuel Kant argues that time is a foundation for an experience and that the simple act of perception has a temporal structure that synthesizes the immediate presentation and one's memory.161 While Kant's structuring of perception may be possible, his presumption that perception and interpretation simultaneously does not hold in cases where there is momentarily asymmetrical input and expectation, such as it occurs in the audio walk. For Cardiff's user, there is a staggering

160 Colebrook, 80. 161 Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, (London: Macmillan, 1961).

83 moment in time and space when the user's understanding of what is happening occurs after the body has perceived it. The audio walk offers an encounter with 'found space' and 'found time', not only territorially or geographically (in the museum spaee or on the street corner), but also within the user. In the extremely brief moment that oecurs when an expected sound source does not materialize visually - that is, before the user realizes or becomes conscious of the fact that no 'real' thing is there - an embodied disjunction of perceptual confusion occurs where "difference lies between two repetitions.,,162 Deleuze understands difference "only in terms of the comparative play of two similitudes.,,163

Difference is self-differentiation, rather than self-sameness or identity; it is simple difference, and not different from something.

Hi. The Mo(ve)ment

The latency between input and perception in the audio walk is a juncture of disjoint. In the nanosecond before the user' s confusion is captured by consciousness in order to be immediately isolated and deciphered for recognition and rationalism, the moment comprises differentiated, non-individuated movement. This suspended mo(ve)ment ean be read as a productive confusion that plays with the differentiation between the physiological body and the cultural/political body as the y wrestle with anticipation, expectation and intuition. The pre-individual is not de-corporealized, it is experienced as corporeality at its most intense - an event prior to interconneetedness with subjectivity. In this pre-individuated oasis, the (sub )ject is alleviated from its functioning

162 Difference and Repetition, 76. 163 Difference and Repetition, 127.

84 r-- as a "front of moral action."I64 In other words, the subject is the individu al who consciously perceives, whereas the pre-conscious, pre-individu al operates differentially.

The body is the always already: both abstract and concrete, objected and subjected. And

the body in the mo(ve)ment is not a unified entity; it is composed of multiple, ecstatic

elements that reconfigure new assemblages of the past and present involving both

animate flesh and inanimate, though dynamic, virtuality.

Although the user realizes that she is neither able to predict what will happen

during the course of her walk through a crowded London street while listening to the

audio track, nor able to ca1culate how to react to surprises she may encounter, her body

will react automatically, even if only in non-visible ways. The invisibility of the

mo(ve)ment should not be denigrated as an insignificant form because it is unquantifiable

and undetectable, it should be read positively. After all, in the mo(ve)ment resulting from

the spatio-temporal relations between the body's reaction to stimulus and delayed

consciousness, the pre-individual comprises a "dynamic space" that can only be defined

'from the point of view of the user tied to that space' and "not an external position".' 165

The mo(ve)ment occurs corporeally - as surface effects of the actual-virtual in a

non-linear region of living. Cardiff appropriately poses the question: "Why is it that our

brains can't function so well when they're given these two realities to cope with? ...

where are our minds in all this?,,166 Rer audio walks illustrate how actions are set in

motion before we decide to perform them - 'a concept which suggests that consciousness

164 Kenneth J. Gergen, "The Self: Transfiguration by Technology" in Dwight Fee, ed. Pathology and the Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience (London: Sage, 2000), 106. 165 Difference and Repetition, 26. 166 http://homepage.mac.com/wmcfar/cardiff.mov CKUT "Where's the Beat?" interview with Janet Cardiff, accessed in Spring 2006.

85 takes a relatively long time to build.' 167 The instance in which the user experiences a

'lack of symmetry' is affirmative "because it indicates the origin and positivity of the

causal process." 168

Prior to Mauss' now famous iteration, "the body is man's first instrument," the

staunchly atheist La Mettrie wrote in the 1700s, "organization is man's first asset and

instruction his second.,,169 For La Mettrie, an individual's experience is organized within

the body, but the brain is still the source of consciousness, 'of aH our feelings, pleasures,

passions and thought'. Thus, arousal becomes the "sympathy of those muscles with the

imagination.,,170 La Mettrie suggests that the primacy of the pre-reflective cogito is the

terrain in which the body' s instrumentalization is most pronounced; where mental

capacities to think and reflect can occur only during and after, but not before the

individu al perceives. In an undetectable and fragmentary fissure in time, the pre-

individu al is sub-subject or, perhaps more appropriately, simply 'ject' , as 'sub' implies

'below'. La Mettrie summarizes this postulation accordingly:

"It is only a posteriori, or by trying as it were to disentangle the soul from the body's organs, that we can, not necessarily disco ver with certainty the true nature of man, but reach the greatest possible degree of probability on the subject.,,171

La Mettrie' s reference to the' greatest possible degree of probability on the subject'

implies that this radical potentiality exists in the pre-individu al. Indeed, at its core, there

is no core; there is nothing but intensities and forces. As phenomenology purports,

"nature" does exist, but it is incorrectly placed in the subject. Here, however, the only

167 John McCrone, Coing inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment ofConsciousness (New York: Fromm International, 2001), 13I. 168 Difference and Repetition, 20. 169 Julian Offray de La Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings, trans. Ann Thomson. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15-16. I~ 170 Ibid 28-29. 171 Ibid 5.

86 nature is movement; and this mo(ve)ment is a pre-conscious corporeality that "refer(s)

back to organic syntheses which are like the sensibility of the senses; the y refer back to a

primary sensibility that we are .. . made of contracted water, earth, light and air - not

merely prior to the recognition or representation of these, but prior to their being

sensed."l72

iv. Ready Constellations, Affirmative Potentialities

The subject's suspension in the mo(ve)ment operates affirmatively as "an

impossible possibility focused by the contours of the simple living body.,,173 The

mo(ve)ment is presumed to be 'impossible' because it is an undetectable and

spontaneously occurring event. Yet, its (dis)juncture is 'possible' precisely because the

"second to second resourcefulness of the body,,174 is lived. As Merleau-Ponty writes,

parts of the present always escape the subject' s know ledge: "My hold on the past and the

future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage

when 1 may full y understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one

more moment bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its tum, further

developments in order to be understood.,,175

ln Walter Benjamin's critique of Kant's writing on experience, he notes that a

'distinction is required between the immediate and natural concept of experience, and the

concept of experience in the context of knowledge.' For Benjamin, misunderstanding

results from the "conflating of concepts of 'experience' and 'knowledge of

172 Difference and Repetition, 73. 173 Thrift, 143. (~ 174 Thrift, 150. 175 Merleau-Ponty, 346.

87 experience,,,176. This dialectic suggests that 'knowledge of experience' is attainable, but

Benjamin does not state how this is possible. In the audio walk, the mo(ve)ment is able to be experienced corporeally, but outside of consciousness, without an awareness of it until it has passed. The mo(ve)ment is synonymous with Deleuze's notion of multiplicity

- a ready constellation, a potentiality of experience, but not necessarily the knowledge of this experience. Multiplicity and becoming are part of Deleuze's reconceptualization of the 'eternal return', which implies the first moment in organization. "The eternal return is the result of chance, the affirmation of necessity, a moment of organization that constructs unit y, that constitutes being by bringing together 'aIl the parts of chance,'" and is not performed according to any performed order, "but in an original organization.,,177

Society is rendered exterior to the original organization of the mo( ve )ment - in which physiological perception eventually frames the user's consciousness. In the mo(ve)ment, the body - in its non-conceptual corporeality - harbors agency over the intellectual enterprise.

Though the world, as William James famously states, is a 'buzzing mass of confusion presented to the senses' and then transformed into perception, everydayness is constituted incrementally over time. It works to stratify and organize reality into easily assimilated categories that, undoubtedly, simplify living. But in the mo(ve)ment - that dramatic but unmeasured moment prior to the mind's awareness of circumstances and their meaning - the body is unmarked, ungendered, and pre-subject; it constitutes the fracture in the "1". In this fractured time, while corporeal immateriality reigns, no daims are staked on the body, and invisibly visible movements remain (nano-momentarily)

176 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913 -1926, in Maracus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 95. 177 Difference and Repetition, 48.

88 unknown by consciousness. Nothing is added, nothing is taken away. Like difference, the mo( ve )ment is pure intensity and potentiality: 'nothing itself but a promise of things to come' . 178

ln the audio walk, the user embarks on a material experimentation of intensities and forces that occur prior to cognitive interpretation. But this pre-conscious mo(ve )ment leaves the user in an unmarked 'event' that produces impersonal, nomadic singularities. James Brusseau suggests that such a Deleuzian 'event' is "what it feels like to arise on the scene," and that it "let[s] the physical action define the borders and meaning.,,179 ln this sliver of experience, the corporeality of the scenario elicits a chaotic field in the user. For Patton and Protevi, the chaotic field is dynamic, geometric and spatio-temporal, and 'not about disorder or nothingness but a void that is a virtual containing aIl forms and speeds which are born and disappear without consequence.,180

As 1 have suggested, the mo(ve)ment achieves "individuation without subject,,181. The mo(ve)ment is that which articulates and connects to itself, "relating different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed.,,182 The pre-conscious event, therefore, results in a "'dismemberment of the body,' a sense of the modern as the occasion for a spectacular disembodiment. ... the body no longer offers itself as a privileged object of representation, but exists instead as a source of discrete sensory intensities which elude symbolization.,,183

178 Aden Evans, Practically Impossible: Deleuze and Ethics (PhD dissertation, 1999),55- 58. 179 Brusseau, 10. 180 Patton and Protevi, Between Deleuze and Derrida (London; New York: Continuum, 2003), 28. 181 Jean Khalfa, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. (London: Continuum, 1999),3. 182 Daniel Smith "The Doctrine ofUnivocity: Deleuze's Ontology ofImmanence," in ed. Mary Bryden Deleuze and Religion (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 175. 183 Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988),95.

89 Cardiff's audio walks le ad the user into experience and not away from it. They .~. produce an actualized virtuality that points to lived but hidden aspects of human

experience: the undetectable intervals, those small spaces oftime and m(ov)ements

between what is seen and heard, when our bodies must make sense of stimuli before

becoming aware of them. The most profound aspect of this realization can be located in

these asymmetries - when a mo(ve)ment is forced into actualization, into Becoming, by

something that is 'imaginary yet based on the real'. When the actual, whose future is still

virtual, is realized, its state of invisibility is irrevocably transformed, like a light being

shone into shadows. This momentous mo(ve)ment refracts a territory of experience that

shocks us into consciousness.

90 r'-.. Conclusion

Claire Colebrook states, "philosophers have to recreate concepts that give

'consistency' to chaos.,,184 The same can be said for artists. Janet Cardiffs audio walk

reveals to us the way we are in the world - through habitus, body technique, automation,

and subjectivity - by showing us how we are already becoming through virtuality and

pre-conscious corporeality. The user moves from constancy to variation in a "chaosmos"

or flow of difference that forces her to encounter experientially, corporeally (and not only

philosophically), the persistent reopening of acting and thinking without allowing the

internaI or external to appear to be a fixed image.

Cardiff' s audio walk does not suggest that as subjects we have no boundaries. The

convention al museum audio guide brings to light how subjects are ordered, worked upon

in the institution. The museum audio guide is intended to accelerate a user's 'knowledge'

about an exhibition, while it also orders her movement through the regulatory space.

Cardiff's walk, Conspiracy Theory, draws the user outside of the usual 'front' spaces of

the exhibition into back spaces, thus challenging what aspects of the user' s behavior are

likely to be produced, and which environments may prove to be transformative of the

space and the strategies the user employs to navigate it.

For Foucauldian theorist, Tony Bennett, the museum is a purposeful structure for

educating and training the general public. It is a highly representative space of history

and artifacts on the one hand, and of bourgeois performance on the other. The most

"progressive aspects of a state's foundation are those whose practical interests intersect

184 Colebrook, 79.

91 with industry and rationalism.,,185 The audio guide is part of the museum's exhibition rhetoric and works as an educational accelerant, alleviating the visitor from having to research and understand an exhibition on her own, and providing it with a map to do so.

The audio guide emphasizes the normatization of highly rational spaces; the soothing yet authoritative voice of the announcer, and the transitional beeps, signal slow procession through the space. The museum audio guide works to reproduce expectations by providing a narrative and logic that is consistent with what its visitor is 'used to.'

Cardiff' s audio walk is an artistic imitation of the museum' s version that reverses its core logic by taking users on a tour full of detours, away from the art itself, and into the back spaces in and around the institution. The audio walk explores a specificity located within the gradient - in the state of exception. The state of exception (as opposed to 'the example') is an "inclusive exclusion,,186 that tests the generic more than a mere representation (which only works to affirm the genre). Cardiff's audio walk provides an exception to how museums are usually navigated. Rer walks offer exceptions to many mIes, allowing the user to gain a sense of the "carefully graded sense of the possibilities of any situation.,,187 The audio walk derails the user whereas the museum conditions and reproduces aspects of subjectivity. Cardiff's tour is a tour not only of the durability of spaces but of the terrain of expectation, experience, and subjectivity.

The audio walk reminds us that subjectivity is fluid and changes with each context, but that each new situation does not necessarily bring about a new concrete

'knowledge,' and instead often works to further support the fact that we have a sense of habitus. Our bodies enact a certain memory when we perform mundane activities such as

185 L enOir, . 33_ . 186 Agamben, 15. 187 Thrift, 152.

92 walking and listening. We perform simple actions without having to recall, consciously, how they are performed. The body' s habitus is, as Mauss suggests, an intricate combination of the physical, sociological, and psychological. Habitus contributes to our interpretation and contemplation of past representations, allowing us 't~ know' what action to take in the present and what action to produce in the future. The integrity of the flesh embodies 'dependable' and consistent behavior when the conscious individual, or subject, performs predictable body technique based on her expectations and experience.

The intangible and inanimate phenomena that we encounter daily, such as sound, are indexical representations to which cultural meaning is ascribed. This is the premise for

Cardiff' s audio walk.

The 'success' of the audio walk relies on the fact that its user is a conscious individual - a subject for whom 'reality' tends to be perceptually congruent. The subject's performativity is heavily reliant on representation and expectation. The audio walk demonstrates that slight incongruities in perception make the otherwise familiar experientially unfamiliar. When the user hears one thing and sees another there is latency in perception. The mind does not immediately 'compute' what has happened. This latency is first experienced by the body and then by awareness. We are always already late for consciousness. In this fissured time, the "1" is dead. The only liveliness is the fracture, the moment of movement, of Becoming. In the small space of time in which the body' s sense of stimuli has not yet gained conscious awareness, the user is pre individual. For Deleuze, the pre-individual cannot exist in corporeality, in human flesh, because this would require that the subject exist; and, were the subject to exist then it would be ruled by the image of thought and grounded in identity - trapped as it were, in

93 Being, in that which makes the outside appear to be another fixed foundation, virtual r--... lifetimes away from Becoming. But consciousness is seduced by exteriority.

Consciousness is Being; it acts like a light cast upon the shadows of pre-conscious

corporeality, exteriorizing their reflexivity until they disappear.

Cardiff's walks reiterate the ways in which consciousness operates to ground us.

However, the mo(ve)ment is an exception. Institutions require habitus, and subjects are

formed by it, but corporeality can exist without both. The mo(ve)ment is corporealized,

it occurs in the body - not in sorne imaginary or philosophical world, but in the

actualized. "Life is embodied experience.,,188 Where the mo(ve)ment is concerned, the

body is 'first on the scene.' As Leppert notes, the "totality of body and mind hardly

exists except in the imagination.,,189

Throughout this paper 1 have suggested ways in which the user, and the user's

body, acts and is acted upon. At times the body is psychoanalytically constructed

(ascribed as cent and anxieties brought about urban experience), conditioned (grounded

by intention and interiority) and Foucaultian (treated as artifact). The presentation of a

user's inconsistent subjectivity in different contexts suggests that it is fluid, that there is

no homogenous subject who operates in the same way in heterogenous settings. 1 do not

propose that any individual has multiple 'selves', expressed through performativity in

different settings, but that one's relation to oneself changes in different contexts. As such,

1 do not suggest that it is only metaphorically possible for an individual to improvise in

how the city is traversed, 1 as sert that Cardiff provides the opportunity for such

188 Lowe, 85. 189 Leppert, 22.

94 reformulation to actually occur. This mo(ve)ment is not a postmodern dream; it is a lived reality, an actuality provoked into being by the virtual dimension.

Though the pre-individual is without subject, a fracture in the "l," the trajectory that leads t~, and triggers such a spontaneous event is, ironically, subjectivity - at the very limits of identity and representation. The user can only be surprised (thereby springing the pre-individu al into virtuality, in its pre-conscious corporeality) because of subjectivity, consciousness, and expectations. There can only be a chaotic disturbance when there is 'normalcy' and a sense of the convention al. The audio walk reinvents potentialities for new experiences, while it reifies old structures, such as civil behavior, habitus and body technique.

The mo(ve)ment is a productive confusion in which chaos is brought to differentiated consistency, and consistency is introduced to the multiplicity of chaos. In the audio walk, the virtual/actual provide us with innumerable circuits of overlapping, folding intensities of consciousness. In other words, Cardiff' s audio walk creates, and combines, actual and virtual worlds as it destroys them. For Deleuze, an actual-virtual is only possible if the actant loses her body, and the pre-individu al can only form heterogenous multiplicities if its depth is eradicated; if there is no body to own it and no consciousness to identify it. Cardiff's audio walk acts as a corrective to Deleuze's daim that the pre-individu al is disembodied. The productive confusion of latency lies at the very heart of embodied experience and differentiated corporeality. Cardiff's work transgresses the significance of a single art work by revealing this mo(ve)ment to be lived.

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