‘For my work I do push the format; there is more of an immersing experience for the audience. With the audio walks I want people to be inside the filmic experience and have the real physical world as the constantly changing visuals of the screen. Every person will have a different experience of the piece depending on what happens around them or where and when they walk.’ (Egoyan, 2002, 62)
‘A remarkable thing about Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s utterly captivating sound installation is how it blurs distinctions between site and art. You enter a clearing in the forest, sit down on a wooden stump, and simply listen. Cardiff and Bures Miller’s work incorporates the actual forest into an audio composition emitted from more than thirty speakers. Sometimes there is a near synchronicity of natural and mediated sounds, and it’s tough to discern what is live and what is recorded.’ – http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/inst/forest.html#
Forest is an immersive sound installation with audience members placed sporadically, usually around a clearing in a forest or woodland area
Noises and sounds are played over a speaker system and the audience are just listening and being transported by the sounds
The sounds vary from ordinary forest sounds such as birds singing and wind blowing, to explosions and gunfire, transporting the audience to a different dimension
The piece disrupts your senses; as although you can only see the forest you are in, you can hear other sounds, of footsteps for example, however no one is there
Everyone can see each other leaving the audience feeling vulnerable and exposed to each others reactions to the noises and sounds
‘The homogenisation of the audience also problematically presumes that audiences consistently do the same thing. But there clearly exist many different understandings about what audiences do, and especially about whether audience participation is fundamentally active or passive.’ (Allain and Harvie, 2006, 133)
The piece is site specific to any forest or woodland area as the same impact would not be had were you sat inside just listening to a clip because the lines between reality and performance would no longer be blurred
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNXRjGniFjY
Allain, P. and Harvie, J. (2006) The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance. New York: Routledge.
Egoyan, A. (2002) Janet Cardiff. BOMB, (79) 62.