The academics want you to believe that live performance (the sweating, breathing, bleeding out loud presence of actual human bodies in actual space) carries some sacred charge that recordings can’t touch. That there’s magic in the ephemeral, nobility in the disappearing act. Every moment unique, finite, gone the second it happens. Like watching your best years evaporate in a rearview mirror while listening to Nirvana at 3 a.m., realizing you can never get back to that first perfect hit of sound.
Film, video, any canned media: they’re supposed to be the death masks we make to trick ourselves into thinking we’ve captured something. Preservation through embalming. But here’s the thing nobody wants to admit: the corpse isn’t the person. The photograph shows you that someone was there, past tense, gone, a ghost trapped in chemicals and light. Roland Barthes, that magnificent depressive, called it an “illogical connection” between here and then. The photograph has no future tense, no forward momentum. It’s a tombstone leaning backards that thinks it’s a window.
Cinema cheats differently. Because it moves, because it lies with such gorgeous, shameless confidence, I don’t experience it as “has been” but as “there it is”: immediate, narcotic, a mainline shot of manufactured now.
All of this rests on a quiet assumption, the kind of theoretical bullshit that sounds profound until I actually stand in a room where it falls apart: that media objects sit on one side of time (the past), and living bodies sit on the other (the present), and the drama is about whether one can ever truly bridge the gap. As if time were a river you could stand on opposite banks of, waving sadly across the current.
Then Janet Cardiff walks into the room and kicks over the whole theoretical bar. Smashes the bottles. Sets fire to the lecture notes.
The Forty Part Motet shouldn’t work according to any of these tidy categories, these neat little taxonomies the theorists build so they can sleep at night. Forty speakers arranged in an oval like some sonic Stonehenge, each one broadcasting a single voice from the Salisbury Cathedral Choir singing Thomas Tallis’s 16th century Spem in Alium. Fourteen minutes on loop: eleven minutes of ecstatic polyphony that’ll pin you to the floor, three minutes of silence to let your nervous system come down off whatever just happened to it. Everything recorded. Nothing live. Dead on arrival, by the old rules.
But the work does not stage the recording as a relic of a vanished performance, some museum piece under glass. It builds an architecture that requires a living body to turn that recording into an event. I’m not the audience. I’m the missing component. The engine won’t turn over without me.
I (I in this case, specifically, but could be you, your dumb beautiful self wandering through space) become the only moving part in the system. The only unstable variable. Bodies drift through the oval like lost pilgrims at a rave they don’t remember arriving at, faces shifting between rapture and confusion, leaning close to one speaker then peeling away, chasing a soprano line, abandoning it for a bass that’s doing something impossible three speakers over, trying to hold all forty voices in their head at once and failing beautifully, gloriously, the way we all fail at holding onto anything worth holding onto. My path through space becomes a mixing board. My position is a filter. My movement is a form of composition. I’m remixing the sixteenth century with my fucking feet.
This isn’t “interactivity” in the cheap, button press sense, the democratized garbage they sell you at science museums. I am not adding to the work. I am what synchronizes it. Without me, it’s just speakers playing to an empty room, which is either Zen perfection or complete meaninglessness depending on how stoned you are.
16th century composition.
21st century recording.
Architectural space.
Present tense perception.
These temporal layers do not line up on their own. My body is the processor that forces them into relation. I’m the bridge, except I’m also walking across myself, which sounds like a Zen koan but is actually just what it feels like to be alive and paying attention.
I’m present in the now, but I’m listening to a moment that happened somewhere else, sometime before. Past and present grinding against each other like tectonic plates, neither one winning, both real, both impossible, both here. But what Cardiff exposes (what she rips open and shows us the guts of) is that this friction isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s the engine of the work. The recording is not a dead past waiting to be contemplated with appropriate solemnity. It’s a temporal charge waiting for my exquisite 6’5″ 45 year old body to complete the circuit. I’m the lightning rod for ghosts singing in Latin.
This is where Barthes’ distinction starts to wobble, then collapses entirely, then gets back up and staggers around the room looking for its shoes. The recording does not sit there as pure “has-been,” some monument to absence. It plays at being immediate: I know it’s a lie, an aesthetic con job, but I play along anyway because what else am I going to do, leave? And in playing along, in moving, in choosing which voice to chase like I’m picking which memory to fall into at 4 a.m., I re-temporalize the sound. The past does not simply appear in the present; it is re-engineered through my embodied traversal of space. I’m a time machine made of flesh and bad decisions.
The pre recorded sound is both residue and construction material. Not resurrection. Not preservation. Recomposition. The difference matters, the way the difference between embalming and surgery matters, the way the difference between a photograph and a wound matters.
What hits hardest (what leaves me standing there after the last voice fades, watching strangers’ faces as they leave the oval, everybody looking slightly stunned like they just woke up from a dream they can’t quite remember) is not awe at technological illusion, and not nostalgia for the “original” choir session that happened in some cathedral I’ll never visit. It’s the dawning recognition that the work was never complete without me. That I wasn’t optional. The document doesn’t just mark what happened; it creates the conditions under which something else can happen. Documentation here is not storage. It’s an activation structure. It’s a loaded gun that needs my finger on the trigger.
The plenitude of the past doesn’t stay dead, but it doesn’t come back whole either. It’s broken apart, spatialized, redistributed across speakers, across frequencies, across the paths of wandering listeners who think they’re just looking at art but are actually making it without realizing it. Meaning, presence, and “now” emerge from this choreography between fixed recording and moving bodies. The event is not in the file. It’s in the encounter. It’s in me, right now, standing between speaker twelve and speaker seventeen, trying to figure out if that’s a tenor or an alto and why it matters so much that I’m almost crying.
Cardiff’s piece quietly detonates the old opposition between live and recorded by showing that both are incomplete categories, that the whole argument was a setup from the beginning. Liveness is not a property of bodies. Recording is not a property of media. What matters is the system that brings bodies, sounds, and space into dynamic relation. Here, the listener is not a witness to an artwork. They are the temporal mechanism that allows it to occur. They are the gear that turns the other gears. They are necessary.
The best kind of haunting isn’t the one where the past returns unchanged, pristine, perfectly preserved in formaldehyde. It’s the one where ghosts and the living have to build something together, in real time, from whatever fragments they can hold in common. Where neither side gets what they want, but both get something better: a moment that couldn’t have existed in either time zone alone. A moment that requires both the dead and the living to collaborate, to compromise, to make something new out of the wreckage of what was.
That’s what I’m doing in that oval. Building a cathedral out of air and old tape and my own dumb beautiful presence. And when I leave, it collapses again, waiting for the next body to walk through and make it real.