Making The Missing Voice (Case Study B)
By Janet Cardiff, Lethbridge, September 1999
Sometimes I don't really know what the stories in my walks are about. Mostly they are a response to the location, almost as if the site becomes a Rorschach test that I am interpreting. For me The Missing Voice was partly a response to living in a large city like London for a while, reading about its history in quiet libraries, seeing newspaper headlines as I walked by the news stands, overhearing gossip, and being a lone person getting lost amongst the masses. Normally I live in a small town in Canada, so the London experience enhanced the paranoia that I think is quite common to a lot of people, especially women, as they adjust to a strange city. I was trying to relate to the listener, the stream of consciousness scenarios that I invent all of the time in my mind as I see someone pass or walk down a dark alley. It is one of my frustrations and entertainments to constantly have these alternative visions and voices, quite often scary or violent, running through my brain as I encounter the simplest of realities. I think it is a desire to dramatize my life, make it real by making it filmic or probably the result of reading too many detective novels or watching too many movies.
Part of my process for this piece was to walk around and take notes on my mini voice recorder. While relistening to these notes in my apartment I realized how this voice became another woman, a different character from myself, a companion of sorts. Also this voice seemed metaphorically to represent how we all have multiple personalities and voices. I saw the woman in the story as being alienated from her own self, but searching for herself through this voice, play-acting, creating false dangers and love affairs, wanting her own story dramatized. At the same time her "voice over" the one that speaks in the third person removes her from the story, keeps her at a safe distance.
Perhaps it is the nature of the walkman as a medium, but most often the stories I use are about the difficulties of relationships and real communication. I see the device of the walkman as a way to have surrogate relationships. I talk with someone intimately, create a relationship, but I am at a safe distance. It is a coward's way but I hope that my pieces give people a sense of knowing someone a little, even if it is only with a unknown voice, a missing one.
Image: Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study B), 1999. Photograph: Gerrie van Noord