Paradise Institute
Originally produced for the Venice Biennale, representing the Canadian Pavilion, The Paradise Institute is an installation by Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller. It is being displayed at Code Live 2, at Emily Carr University from 11 am to 8 pm for the rest of the duration of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. The piece is about five metres, by eleven, and three metres high, with a simple plywood exterior that is like the shape of a camera or television monitor. On the inside, the space is made to look like an old cinema–two rows of velvet-covered seats, and headphones placed on hooks beside each one. The seats face a rectangular window that overlooks what appears to be the lower level of a large cinema. This illusion is created through the use of perspective, in the way the room is built, but also with tiny seats within the space beyond the rectangular window.
Placed in the Concourse gallery at Emily Carr University, from the exterior, you get the sense that it is a narrow interior space, on the inside. As you enter either of the two rows of what appears to be an old cinema, it is indeed very narrow. However, sitting down on the seats, looking forward into the rectangular window, you realize that though you are in a small space, your sensations give off signals that suggest that you are sitting in the balcony of a large cinema, towering over a large audience below. As the thirteen minute long black and white film begins to play in the front, you are listening through the headphones. It soon becomes evident that there is as much happening in the background of the space is there is in the film. The audio that the audience hears is the audio from the film playing but also from what appears to be from the environment around where the audience is sitting. Voices making comments on the movie from what appears to be audience members in the background, amplifies the feeling that you are in a much larger cinema, with a crowd. It’s all very visceral, with moments when you feel that the voices in the background are so convincing that you can almost place where the voices are in relation to your seating. In that way, the audience is very interactive with the installation because they play a role in the narrative of the cinema as “audience”. Visual perspective, amplified with the element of audio, and the physical feeling of sitting in the seat at the theatre, and transports you into a very different space.
Perhaps it is also meant to transport the experiencer into a different time. With the use of black and white film, and the overall classic cinema style pieces, there is a sense of nostalgia. The elements of illusion, and play with perception, as well as the element of nostalgia, play a large role in the installation, and together really echo the obvious fascination human sensation in the artists. Human senses, being what humans rely on to know the world outside their bodies, the senses in this installation trick the brain to be affected in different ways, creating an altered reality, that is built on the sensation. It provokes thought on the reliability and function of our senses, which allow us to live daily life. Further, it makes me contemplate about logic. In this installation, rationality tells the experiencer that they are, in fact not inside a large cinema, but inside an installation. Logic tells the experiencer that they are listening to headphones which transfer signals or sensations of being in an audience of people who are not present. However, sensations give off other information. How do we, as humans scale logic with sensation, and why does logic seem to weigh more than sensation? Those are questions that this installation provoked for me.
Ultimately, this installation was successful in the way that it produced an illusory experience of a difference place and perhaps time. Through it’s various elements of play with perspective in the construction of the room, and the binaural audio, it effectively tricks the brain, and therefore brings forth the question of how the brain can be tricked in other ways through senses.
p.s. I will post up the final panorama that I was critiqued on two weeks ago!
