Mixed Media with binaural audio
Dimensions variable
To Touch consists of a large wooden table in the center of a scantly lit room on which visitors can play as they would a musical instrument. By stroking the surface with their hands they call up different sound and narrative scenarios, which issue from hidden loudspeakers on the walls round about. The recipient becomes the performing artist who awakens a pre-set score to life. Within a set of possible parameters, they create variations. Certainly after each outcome there are other expectations: the mysterious story itself, and not the current one generated by the viewer/interpreter, remains vague.
Whispers and fragments of conversations spoken by a male and three female voices are mixed with the familiar sounds of a car screeching, telephone ringing, a knife being sharpened, a gun shot, movie music. “The sound is perceived to be coming from all around the listener in a sculptural way,“ Cardiff describes. “Immersion in the sound is very important for installations as well as sound being able to define space.” Foregrounding touching, listening, and the act of imagining vs. looking,To Touch toys with the notion of totalizing perception, an impressive Gesamtkunstwerk of the senses. But as the artist says, “The piece does nothing if someone doesn’t come over and touch it.”
*1957 Brussels, Ontario, Canada