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Some new friends new to their NYC experiences asked for one thing they shouldn’t miss. Not at all an easy question. But Janet Cardiff’s “Her Long Black Hair” immediately came to mind.

Having directed quite a few friends to the piece, and seeing their excitement after experiencing it, it was an easy rec. Since we’re entering the absolute best season in the city, and because the piece works best on a nice day, it was easy to share.

That said, a friend who recently experienced it suggested the piece might actually work well on less pleasant days too. I’m looking to try it again when it gets colder.

From Public Art Fund’s site:

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 experience. Cardiff (b. 1957, Brussels, Canada) takes the 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.

After having experienced the piece in 2005 I pinged Public Art Fund each year asking if it’d be reintroduced. Eventually Dan Phiffer, whose work I was already following after discovering him through a Flickr project of his, had archived the piece and made his clone available. The clone persisted until Public Art Fund brought the official re-release online.

Mechaneyes.com was a blog then, and I absolutely had to write a post—shared below—reflecting on the experience. At that time, 2005, I was obsessed with mobile and contemplating the future of augmented reality. It’s interesting to revisit the post now and see where’d I’d been.

The piece itself offers the experience of traversing time. Thinking back to it today has done something similar for me.

Revisiting my writing style from 2005 is a curious exercise, as is looking at photography back then. What I was doing on the web and what was going through my head feels both distant and familiar. Thanks to the Internet Archive, it’s accessible here.

Time Is an Invention
July 25th, 2005 @ 12:21 am

As with The Telephone Call, the work I saw experienced @ SFMOMA in 2001, I started Janet Cardiff’s piece, Her Long Black Hair, seated on a bench, this time in Central Park. When Cardiff instructed me to stand up, I stood. When told to walk past the statue, I did. Though Cardiff told me she was there, what I didn’t expect was that there’d actually be a woman taking a picture at the bottom of the stairs. Experiencing synchronicities throughout the piece sometimes became overwhelming.

The experience of watching a film is very personal. Though you may be surrounded by other viewers, you’re hardly interacting with them, and in speaking with them afterward, you’re awareness of just how individual an experience it was is often heightened. With Cardiff’s very cinematic walking pieces, this is obviously accentuated by the fact that a particular viewer’s surroundings are populated by different players who’s presence and snippets of conversation will affect that individual experience completely differently than for a viewer who embarks on the same piece just minutes later.

Cardiff asks the viewer to pace his footsteps with the sound of her own. In this way she is able to accurately sync the piece with the viewer’s surroundings and experience. I made the mistake(?) of trying to photograph while experiencing the piece. The action of composing photographs stripped me from the immediacy of the work. In the end I settled on snapping pics without looking through the viewfinder, trying to react automatically to the prompting of Cardiff’s voice. Though most people won’t need some sort of photographic documentation of the experience, I do. At the end of the piece, it was pleasing to sit at the perch overlooking Bow Bridge and re-listen to the work along with the images I’d captured. Realizing how badly my images chronicled the work, I was put at ease when toward the end of the piece Cardiff reminded me that “the camera tries over and over to capture it, but it can’t.”

While I’m not particularly excited with the images I made, feel free to have a look.

I’d almost suggest against photographing while experiencing the piece, but if you do, much as I’m interested to hear what friends think about a film we’d just watched, I’d be interested in seeing what you might have shot along the way. Lemme know. Perhaps it’s best to leave your camera idle, and let the film unfold before your eyes and between your ears.

Permanence is a strong theme throughout the work. There are a multitude of examples with which Cardiff is able to make the viewer aware of the subject. References, both through her verbal descriptions of events occurring in other eras, and through the accompanying photographs, highlight differences in time. Interesting is the way when asked to imagine dissimilarities in surroundings, the viewer is quickly transported out of his immediate physical experience and is able to exist within the imaginary environment Cardiff suggests. This gives the viewer the ability to simultaneously dwell in different temporal settings.

The immersive, three dimensional quality of the recording can at times be disorienting. Often I wondered if what I was hearing was actually taking place around me, or if it was provided by Cardiff. This augmenting of reality interests me because it is so palpable and is achieved strictly through audio cues setting off the viewer’s imagination. Devices and applications are beginning to appear that can visually augment physical environments by projecting objects, people.. whatever, into our surroundings. Here, viewers are allowed to create visuals within their own minds which become as arresting as visual aids placed in front of their faces, or as often was the case, just over their shoulders.

One day we will able to collect and distribute the consciousness of individuals for others to experience eXistenZ style. More interesting and, obviously through Her Long Black Hair, attainable, is the augmentation and subtle manipulation of our physical surroundings and experiences.

The work is presented by Public Art Fund, and runs through September 11, 2005. Stop by the green kiosk at 59th Street and Sixth Avenue, Thursdays thru Sundays from 10-3:30 to trade a driver’s license or credit card for a diskman and headphones.