So this is how it goes.

You are at Customs House, down at Circular Quay, at dusk, or shortly after. You must be there, at Customs House, at dusk, or shortly after, otherwise the whole thing won’t work.

Janet Cardiff has been here, at Customs House, before, and you are now using your smartphone to see what she has filmed for you to see. What she saw, what you see through the camera view of your smartphone, is quite a lot like what you see, although what she saw was different, too, because it was at another time, though not another space. So different people were milling about in the foyer, they were peering down at the giant model of the city sunken below the surface of the glass floor, pretty much like people now are doing. The model, quite a spectacle, is always itself intriguing and slightly unnerving, with or without a smartphone to look at it through. Janet thinks so too.

Janet is talking to you, she has constructed a soundscape for you to listen to while you follow the journey she has made from this point, around dusk or slighly afterwards, into a city of forking paths. Janet wants you to turn around, to walk towards the building exit, paying particular attention to a man in a dark jacket, leaning by a column, who she saw and she filmed when she was here, before you were here, she wants you to look at the same column and see where the man who is no longer there was standing.

She takes you outside, to the steps of Customs House where a great wide expanse of grey windswept tiles will always be there to greet and confound you. The great wide expanse of grey windswept tiles confounded her too, when she was here. You are now standing on the steps of Customs House, holding a smartphone up and looking through it as though about to take a photo, with headphones on.

The soundscape you are listening to features Janet’s voice, but also the sounds of the space you’re in, when she was here, which she recorded binaurally, in order to sound life-like. A crowd of kids passed Janet by when she stood here, surveying the expanse, they pass you by, too, aurally that is, from the top right of your vision to behind your right shoulder. You can hear them so clearly, and the life-like sounds of these chatterers passing makes you want to swivel around and catch them. But of course they’re not there.

Janet plays these tricks for you. She uses the gaps in time between her being here and you being here to knock at the surfaces of what we see, loosening the tightness of reality into something that might be recomposed just a little. Is it time, or space, that she’s unravelling? A bit of both, perhaps.

This is her art of ‘physical film’ making: using the space of the city, your passage through it, as filmic substance. This is different to making a film about a city, about a place, about a person; her medium is the physical inhabiting of a place as filmic substance. The trick here is that what is mostly making this film is not so much what we see but what we hear. It is the sound that sculpts our physical film, just as a film soundtrack will always establish the dramatic pretext of a visual narrative.

Janet conjures from this space here a performance. What could be? Rollerbladers spinning in action, street musicians, perhaps? Let’s see them. They come, they go. Edits in the filming are not smooth. Time and its possibilities are sliced up, orthogonal. Your intimate space is part of this too: a man is seen approaching, he comes a bit too close, he is close to your field of view now, his voice is close to you. It is time to move on. Janet tells you it is time to move on, to follow her steps, keeping the view you see through your camera view matched as much as possible to your own position.

You wander slowly, stiltedly, like a person idiotically trying to walk with a smartphone held up in front of their face, towards Circular Quay, now amongst the flocks of people going about their business at dusk, or slightly afterwards.

You have Janet telling you she’s an artist, she’s alone here in this city, she tells you she’s always an artist alone in a city, somewhere, trying to find some place to eat. She sounds lonely, a bit bored too. She’s seeing tourists here, this is a tourist place, she’s wondering about the networks of travel and mobility that could be mapped here, lines of flight fanning out from this point to many myriad destinations across the globe.

Talking to you, she’s your fellow traveller, we’re both here together, we can share this space, this space fractured by time but knitted back together as filmic space. We encounter the man again: he is the antagonist she created for this physical-film, he is speaking to us now about multiple realities, the multiverse, he asks what if all this was only one sliver of reality? What if there were many more?

We are now becoming the trick. The time in which we’re standing here, at Circular Quay, slightly after dusk, watching this man, through the camera view of our smartphone, listening to Janet tell us to walk to the harbour master’s steps, we’re only one of these slivers of time, too, with no greater claim to know this space than any other of these characters, past or present.

We are standing at the very place where Europeans first settled in Australia. Janet tells us this. The harbour master’s stairs, so different in scale to the ferry docks, the city skyline behind us, feel like a trace from this other time of early settlement. She takes us down the stairs, the stairs are covered in water from the harbour. Is this allowed? Can we get wet feet? She takes us down to the bottom of the stairs, so we stand below the promenade. We can’t see him, but we can hear behind us the man we encountered before getting agitated now, then suddenly somehow Janet has fallen in to the harbour, he has likely pushed her, for a second, in our camera view, there is only water, a view back up to the Quay, to where we are standing. She quickly recovers, it seems, and we are asked to move on.

And so there is real drama in this city-film, but only a little. The falling-in incident goes unremarked upon for the rest of the walk. We are led into the Rocks, taken down some of the more enchanting little streets and alleys one can encounter in this oldest part of Sydney town. Janet knows how to pick a route.

She lets us look with new eyes at the work of historians, curators and landscape architects who have crafted little enclaves within the city here that let the past speak for itself; the little colonial house with no walls but a door and a frame, wooden furniture left to mark the former uses of spaces, we hear the echoes of tour guides as we step gingerly down the uneven sandstone stairs, we hear torrential rain falling, as is so common in Sydney, though it is not falling as we walk this evening.

We encounter more performers: people who make music out of the textures of the alleyways, the bins, the rock faces, discarded metals, steps. Our antagonist continues to visit us, threatening and slightly agitating. He is a loose canon.

We hear residents of Millers Point whose public houses are now being sold off. We hear Janet’s co-creator George talking to Janet sometimes. He says: “think of what we could play here – all that stuff we listened to while researching for this piece” and we here a selection of random old recordings that must be related somehow.

Janet loves the little old terraces that look down on Pottinger Place, so enfeebled in their domesticity against the dramatic sandstone rockface they sit upon. They prompt her to remember the nightmares she experienced as a child; she looks up at the windows and wonders what deeds of wrongdoing could be placed there, in a spooky film.

There are generations of families going back in time here; the alleys are layered by memories of childhood, kids swimming out into the harbour from the wharf. We depart the scene, the forking path takes us away, back to the Harbour Bridge, Janet is noticing the tree roots in the standstone rocks as we clamber up stairs, then she leaves us at the entrance to the foot tunnel under the bridge.

We are left alone, with our smartphone. The smartphone is still playing the film, it takes us now through the illuminated fluorescent walkway, the view tips upside down, perhaps we are the ones underneath the harbour now, alone here, with our smartphones, in the city, at night.

The work of Janet Cardiff and George Bueres Miller has spanned cities and continents, forests and galleries, small boats and abandoned filing cabinets. These artists are in the business of making magic spaces.

They come from the line of Borges, they return again and again to his stories, his metaphors, this city of forking paths is a map that has become as big as the world. For this Sydney project, Janet and George worked on and off for about a year, commissioned by the City of Sydney as the ‘inaugural artwork’ within its ‘permanent art collection’.

How strange for a work such as this to be classified a permanent artwork. Whether an app is a permanent thing is one thing. But the experience conjured is also the very antithesis of what we would ordinarily describe as a ‘permanent artwork’: an experience of time, fractured by spatial passages, layered and forked and stacked without end.

The work is also described as ‘Augmented Reality’, aligning with the tech-boom taking the ad world by storm. We are all going to be augmenting our realities all the time, soon, likely not with clunky smartphones but watches, glasses, earpieces. How quaint all of our glowing rectangles will soon become!

This artwork riffs of our curiosity with what augmentation might feel like, but this is not really ‘digital art’ in a technical sense, there is no geodata underpinning it, but there are loose references to its conventions. You can only access the app that drives the tour at Customs House, from dusk. Any other time or place and you are locked out.

The artists seem to be tricking up the technology conventions here: augmented reality is not only about space as code, it is also about space as a remembered, fractured, haunted territory. At one point we see in the crowds only people walking, looking at their glowing rectangles, talking on them, for Janet this feels ghastly, you know she wants people to see beyond them, just as she uses the device to show you this.

In 1996 Janet made a soundwalk for London’s Brick Lane called The Missing Voice and you could listen to it using a walkman; you had to borrow the tape from the library. She’s added video now and the sound is better but her tugging at the possibilities of space and time plays with the same basic toolset: the re-sculpting of embodied experience using the ultimate augmented reality that is sound, using her voice, urging intimacy, speaking loneliness, placing the strangeness of our urban natures back into our immediate view.

We here in Sydney will know our streets to be a little bit different now that Janet’s been here.

http://www.cardiffmiller.com/

This is the first of two pieces reflecting on The City of Forking Paths.  

Last Drinks – One More Round at the Hotel Australia

Imagine a hotel so grand that famed French actress Sarah Bernhardt performed at its opening night in 1891; an establishment so glamorous that it was the hotel of choice for Hollywood heavyweights Katharine Hepburn, Shirley Bassey and Sir Robert Helpmann â?? and you will be recreating the famed Hotel Australia.

The video and sound installation project, Last Drinks: One more round at the Hotel Australia, is part of the City of Sydney’s 11th annual Art & About Festival running from 21 September until 21 October 2012. A series of night time installations will re-inscribe the hidden history of the precinct back onto the buildings and laneways of the precinct, enabling memories of sophistication and style to collide with the present day.

Visit the Last Drinks website to find out more.

Here’s a selection of videos from the project.

Last Drinks: Australia Hotel, Commonwealth Bank, Martin Place from sarah barns on Vimeo.

Last Drinks video installation, Commonwealth Bank, Martin Place Sydney from sarah barns on Vimeo.

Rowe St video projections for Last Drinks, Art & About Sydney 2012 from sarah barns on Vimeo.

Lees Court video projections, Last Drinks project, Art & About Sydney 2012 from sarah barns on Vimeo.

If you plan to make it along before the Festival finishes – do consult the map before you go. There are also signs and maps around the site and an msite to help you around. But to be sure, here is a map of the installations.

This question was the premise of Unguarded Moments, a series of site-specific video installations featuring in selected locations throughout Walsh Bay and Millers Point during Art & About Sydney 2011. The project was supported by the City of Sydney and the result of a collaboration between designer Michael Killalea of killanoodle and myself as researcher and producer.

Projections drew from documentary films and photographs, featuring past & present residents and workers. In this way, the history of the working port, its waterside workers and its residents were re-inscribed back into its present day environment – exteriors of buildings, interiors of shopfronts, sandstone walls, and even the underside of a wharf. The website was also developed to provide more in-depth coverage of the many different films, photographs, and people that featured in the film projections. An intensely fascinating project, with incredible support from the City of Sydney and past and present residents of Millers Point.

Here’s a selection of videos projected as part of the installations. Produced by Michael Killalea and edited by Gabrielle Dowrick. Generous support from the National Film and Sound Archive.

‘Views’ – excerpts.

This projection features landscape imagery of Millers Point, rear projected through the front window of 44 Argyle Place Millers Point. Projection one of nine featuring as part of Unguarded Moments Millers Point, for Art and About Sydney 2011. Original photos sourced from a number of collections including the City of Sydney archives, the State Records Authority and the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority.

Local Lives – Abraham Mott Hall.

Projection featuring community photos featuring as part of Unguarded Moments Millers Point, featuring as part of Art & About Sydney 2011. This is a close-up of the projection shot from the roof of the Abraham Mott Hall.

Girl Eating a Sandwich – Walsh Bay

Video loop, 2011.
Rear projection
Shop 12, 23 Hickson Rd.Video loop, 2011.
Sourced from Rupert Kathner’s Australia Today: Customs Officer’s War Against Drugs (1938).
With support from the National Film and Sound Archive Australia.

Big Industry – Hickson Rd Millers Point

Video loop, Hickson Rd, Millers Point. Sourced from archival film footage shot on location. Credits include Waterside Workers Federation Film Unit The Hungry Miles (1955), Pensions for Veterans (1954) and November Victory (1953).

Power, Pickups and Protest
Projected onto Pottinger St, Walsh Bay.

For the project’s accompanying website, I’ve been able to set up some useful hyperlocal services, using Channels on Flickr and YouTube to aggregrate and re-publish a number of images and films relating the area. It’s amazing how much the web has changed since I worked on Sidetracks only 3 years ago.

Check out the website here.

More to come on this project.

Bob and Margaret Fagan opened the first session with song – Margaret sang ‘City of Green‘ and Bob gave a heartfelt rendition of ‘Monuments’. Both were written by the godfather of Australian union songs, Denis Kevans.

Excerpt of the Green Bans Mural, Woolloomooloo. Image by Sarah Barns, 2008.

It was hard not to be moved by the sentiment of these songs – and be reminded of the potential for academic inquiry be not only of the head but also of the heart. Having used an excerpt of ‘City of Green’ at the end of my 2007 soundwalk I was particularly moved to hear it performed in person by Margaret. We closed the session with a screening of Denise White and Pat Fiske’s Woolloomooloo, taking us back to the hectic days on Victoria St in 1974, days when the wharfie Mick Fowler lambasted the developers for kicking out low income people from their homes, when Wendy Bacon squatted with the rest of them and promoted the values of alternative community living, when council aldermen sounded like Andrew Briger – see below. I fear people of such poise no longer walk this earth…

Many thanks to Kurt Iveson and Nicole Cook for organising the session.

Linda Carroli’s review of the event can also be read below.

Architecture Australia Review: The Right to the City Symposium & Exhibition

Through ABC Pool, I’ve been working to publish a number of the archival recordings featured on Sydney Sidetracks through an open access Creative Commons licence. That means they are now available for re-use and remix. The project is starting with the Sydney collection, but will be expanding to include other cities very soon.

The project has featured on the ABC’s social media website Pool. It launched on January 2011 and has since seen the release of a number of additional ABC TV & Radio Archives items into the public domain.

An example of some of the items I have cleared through this project include:

VP Day 1945

Voices

Through this project I cleared a number of voice recordings of infamous Sydney-siders, including the gunman Chow Hayes, the activist Juanita Nielsen and the colourful lady-about-town Bea Miles.

Living on the Fringe

As part of this ABC Pool project I conducted an interview with the director, Gian Carlo Manara, and undertook further research into the ABC’s document archives to uncover some of the unwanted press associated with the release of this once controversial documentary.

Q&A With GianCarlo Manara, Director of Living on the Fringe
Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives

GianCarlo Manara, director of the ABC’s 1963 documentary Living on the Fringe, shares some of his memories about the film with Sarah Barns.

SB: What opportunities were there for documentary makers working in Australia at this time? How important was the ABC in supporting documentary production?

GM: At the time we made Living on the Fringe, there weren’t so many opportunities for the few people with sufficient professional skill to make documentaries. The ABC was one of the first institutions to offer that chance, through programs like Big Country.

SB: Was this a difficult film to make within the ABC at this time?

GM: Documentaries like this weren’t very common. It was Allan Ashbolt in the Talks Dept who wanted to use television to make more political documentaries like this one. We worked together on Four Corners – our association grew from there.

SB: What inspiration did you draw from when making this film? (for example, Italian neo-realist films etc).

GM: I graduated in Film Direction and Scriptwriting in Italy in 1955. We all in the school were the products of Italian neo-realism. I personally have been also influenced by other filmmakers such as Grierson, Rota, and Cavalanti.

SB: Did your own migrant story influence this film in any way?

GM: No, I was not influenced by my migrant experience, but by the stark reality of the life of the neglected and the poor. The the media at the time always preferred to ignore this.

SB: How did people on the streets of Sydney react to your filming of them?

GM: Filming in the streets at that time was still a novelty. I often used a “candid camera” approach to catch reality. An exception was when I asked my sexy friend Diana Roberts, now the well know writer Di Morrisey, to walk around some streets in East Sydney. At this time many Italians and Maltese migrants used to hang around on Sunday morning. Migrants at the time were very lonely â?? no social life and above all no women! The “Latin Lover” was not yet a trendy image!

SB: What did you hope audiences would learn from Living on the Fringe?

GM: My hope was for the average viewer to understand that Australia was not just the land of milk and honey – that here, just like other part of the world, there were people in need.

SB: Do you think Sydney is a better city today than it was when Living on the Film was made?

GM: Is Sydney a better place today? It is a big question. It is certainly different – there is more social awareness in the area of welfare and help. Of course lifestyles are also very different. Is it better? If I look back at the Sydney of this time I see a child, and today I see an adult. But is the adult of today better than the child of yesterday? It is a big question… I often think about it, about the old beach carnival when the Life Savers were marching like soldiers, when the girls were wearing petticoats and Saturday night was the night of dance at the Trocadero! All gone! However the girls are still beautiful, and the Life Savers are still so important and so Australian!

But one thing is for sure: the “greed” that today is often rampant was not so much at the time, even if everyone of course attempted to make some â??quidsâ??!

The BLF Green Bans

The back of the Theatre Royal in Sydney - near Rowe Lane, site of the demolished Rowe St.

resonant traces of the city: an archaeology of recorded action

A component of my PhD was the production of a number of sound pieces which I’ve labelled ‘sound marks’. These pieces are intended to take the listener back to historical moments and events in the life of Sydney. Todayâ??s listener might chart a course through central Sydney, â??visitingâ?? these moments in much the same way that one might visit a monument or landmark. Theyâ??re not, in the main, attached to visible landmarks.

The sound marks can be accessed here.

What’s so special about Victoria St?

Victoria St has long been one of Sydney’s most prized locations, described by the National Trust in the 1970s as the ‘Montmartre of Sydney’.

It was also the site of the first public housing campaign in Australia (Ashton 1993: 104). In 1971 first-time property developer Frank Theeman acquired whole rows of houses here through his company Victoria Point Pty Ltd, with plans to demolish the terrace houses and build a number of office and apartment towers. Theeman gained council approval for his plans in March 1973, when he began to issue eviction notices to tenants of these properties, many of which were boarding houses available for low rent.

Read on…

LISTEN IN:

1. Soundwalk:’I built a city of green, the best you’ve ever seen’

2. 115 Victoria St: Mick Fowlerâ??s Funeral

3. 202 Victoria St: Juanita’s home

1. Wendy’s speech outside 115 Victoria St

More Green Bans…

[1] This is the way Wendy Bacon described Sydney in her speech outside 115 Victoria St in 1974, featured in my Victoria St soundwalk.

[2] Accounts of what happened on Victoria St that day are available through a number of web resources, and are documented by Pat Fiske in Woolloomooloo (1979). References include Milliss (1974); Milliss and Brennan (1974); Rees (2004); Squatspace (2004); Burgmann and Burgmann (1993). The transcript of an interview with Mundey reflecting on the importance of the Green Bans to the development of Australian cities is available from the ABC at http://www.abc.net.au/tv/talkingheads/txt/s2649576.htm

Sydney Sidetracks is a multi-platform initiative supported by ABC Innovation to explore the distribution of the ABCâ??s audio-visual archive using map and mobile interfaces. The site was launched in November 2008, featuring over 50 stories about Sydney, which represent â??points of interestâ?? on a map that users can explore either online or out and about in Sydney using their mobile phone.

You can read an interview with me by Seb Chan of the Powerhouse Museum here.

I’ve also reflected on some of the highlights of the Sidetracks collection here.

In 2009 Sydney Sidetracks was awarded Best Cross-Media Content project in the ABC’s Digital Innovation Awards.