Interactive History: Janet Cardiff’s “Her Long Black Hair”

For my interactive sound activity, I chose to do artist Janet Cardiff’s audio walk through Central Park, starting at the Jose Marti statue and ending about 35 minutes later at Bethesda Fountain. The original project can still be found here.

Even though this audio walk was conceptualized in 2005, the audio and photography archive still exists in MP3 and PDF form, respectively, online. Additionally, almost all elements of the park Cardiff points out during her audio narration are still in place, even down to the location of a drinking fountain and an ice cream stand. Cardiff narrates your walk and you are encouraged to walk in step with her own steps, so when she points out something in the park the timing coincides with your own path.

The premise of the experience from the website:

“Janet Cardiff's Her Long Black Hair is a 35-minute journey that begins at Central Park South and transforms an everyday stroll in the park into an absorbing psychological and physical experience. Cardiff takes each listener on a winding journey through Central Park's 19th-century pathways, retracing the footsteps of an enigmatic dark-haired woman. Relayed in a quasi-narrative style, Her Long Black Hair is a complex investigation of location, time, sound, and physicality, interweaving stream-of-consciousness observations with fact and fiction, local history, opera and gospel music, and other atmospheric and cultural elements. At once cinematic and non-linear, Her Long Black Hair uses binaural technology--a means of recording that achieves incredibly precise three-dimensional sound--to create an experience of physical immediacy and complexity.”

When the audio walk was originally conceptualized, a participant would receive a CD player with headphones and a stack of photographs (lefthand side in images below) that Cardiff prompts you to look at at various spots along your walk. While she never explicitly states where all the photos are from, the images of the woman with “long black hair” are eventually revealed to be from a set of photographs Cardiff found at a flea market; the woman is unknown, but the journey seems to center around Cardiff’s reimagining of a path this woman (and her unknown photographer) may have taken through Central Park.

The audio experience combines elements of Cardiff’s personal narration and musings and sound elements of Central Park, such as nature sounds and people conversing, laughing, walking, riding bikes, etc. A few times during the experience another narrator would briefly take over, and these dialogue moments often had something to do with history (namely: slavery).

There were many moments during this experience where I could not decipher what was real noise and what was the fictional sound in my noise-cancelling headphones due to the nature of the binaural technology. It was very surreal and often times disorienting. It was very odd to walk along a path and have Cardiff note something happening within the park that she saw (or invented) 16 years ago happening in a similar way in my reality. For example, at one point Cardiff observes an Asian couple taking wedding photographs by the fountain, and as Cardiff narrated this in my ears a young Asian woman approached me, asking me to take a photo of her family in front of this same fountain.