Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: FOREST (for a thousand years…)

The Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, in collaboration with the UCSC Arboretum and Botanic Garden, and the San José Museum of Art, is pleased to announce the opening of FOREST (for a thousand years…), the beguiling and uncanny audio installation by renowned Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. 

Reviewing Cardiff and Miller’s 28 minute sound experience in Art and America, Gregory Volk writes, “A remarkable thing about Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s utterly captivating sound installation is how it blurs distinctions between site and art. You enter a clearing in the forest, sit down on a wooden stump, and simply listen. Cardiff and Bures Miller’s work incorporates the actual forest into an audio composition emitted from more than thirty speakers. Sometimes there is a near synchronicity of natural and mediated sounds, and it’s tough to discern what is live and what is recorded… In turn, frightening and deeply touching, ominous and serene, Cardiff and Bures Miller’s forest soundscape is a wonder.”

The immersive 22–channel audio piece, originally commissioned for dOCUMENTA 13, can be experienced in the redwood grove of UC Santa Cruz’s Arboretum and Botanic Garden April 7–June 30, 2018, 10–5 p.m. Admission to FOREST is included in a visit to the Arboretum and Botanic Garden.

The Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS) is an arts–based interdisciplinary programming and exhibition forum of the UC Santa Cruz Arts Division.