Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: The Murder Of Crows

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: The Murder of Crows

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's The Murder of Crows is a surrealistic sound installation inspired in part by Goya's famous etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. This hallucinatory work depicts a man asleep with owls and bats swooping menacingly around his head; Cardiff and Miller's title also refers to the habit among crows of flocking to a dead crow and cawing collectively, often for over a day, in a crow funeral. The installation is composed of 98 speakers that visually mimic the flocking crows and issue both ambient and musical sounds, and a desk (mimicing Goya) with a megaphone from which Cardiff's voice relays a series of dreams. This artist's book account of the project--as well as selected earlier projects--includes documents, interviews with the artists, ornithological and literary texts referring to crows, plus a DVD and 3-D reproductions with glasses.