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A moment of destruction and creation : Janet Cardiff's <The Murder of Crows> and the sound as a ‘historical object’
The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art
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It is the purpose of this paper to analyze the sound installation artwork <The Murder of Crows> by contemporary artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller through the theory of allegory by Walter Benjamin, and thereby to illuminate an artistic possibility of contemporary new media arts, by interpreting the artwork as a reconstructor of a 'historical object' in Benjamin's context. According to this interpretation, <The Murder of Crows> makes an allegorical reading of <The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters> created in 18th century by F. Goya. The reason <The Murder of Crows>, consisting of meaningless and material noises, refers to the sounds and the artwork in the past is not that it has a nostalgia, but that it wants to cope with contemporary issues in a way only new media arts can do. This artwork reconstructs an audible world usually regarded as a 'monster' and repressed beneath the surface of modernity of which principles have been logics of representation and imaginary unity. With new sound technologies, the artwork tries to create an audible world as an object of experience by presenting fragmented sounds, the sensory data which did not exist in Goya's work. Inventing sounds as physical impacts and creating hallucinatory spaces without visual anchors, <The Murder of Crows> presents a positive way of reinterpreting the phenomena of severance and fragmentation caused by contemporary catastrophes.
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