March 2006

Interdisciplinary artists Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark like to use the term “out-of-sync” when referring to the process they employ when collaborating on a project. They come up with key concepts and ideas jointly, but they work independently creating their respective parts of the whole — Maria the visuals, Norie the sound — before bringing them together to see how they fit. “Our projects are about how sound and image can work separately but together,” Norie explains. “Neither is subordinate to the other.”

The surprise, they say, is that the process seems to work. And work it does; in fact, it’s one they’ve been utilizing successfully for the past 10 years. The two artists met at a community-based radio show in their homeland of Australia in the 1990s, a time when both were becoming fascinated with the potential of computer technology as a new form of artistic expression. For Norie it was the interactive possibilities with sound that captured her interest; for Maria it was the intensity and intimacy of the small screen. Soon they had paired up to create their first collaborative piece — one of the first art CDROMs to be released in Australia — Shock in the Ear, an installation that went on to be exhibited internationally and win a number of awards.

Maria and Norie’s focus has echoed the ever-changing nature of technology. Over the past few years much of their work has been done on the Internet. “Our interest in the Internet has been based on its potential for a certain sort of expanded fiction and the possibility for collaborative play,” they elaborate. “We are interested in making a fiction through sound, words, and images, as well as interactions with others and playful encounters.” Their sites Museum of Rumour, The Perpetual Emotion Machine, and The 4th Floor (all of which can be viewed at www.out-of-sync.com) demonstrate different ways they have gone about constructing alternative worlds within the confines of the World Wide Web.

“The 4th Floor” is the second part of a larger piece titled The Search for rue Simon-Crubellier, which uses a Paris street mentioned in George Perec’s book Life: A User’s Manual as a point of departure. The Search for rue Simon-Crubellier explores real and imagined relations to location, and poses the question: “Is it possible to bring something that does not exist into existence by searching for it?” The first part of the work is based on real-life encounters Maria and Norie had with locals while actually searching for the imaginary rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris.

The title of the third part of this project, “The Disappearance”, relates to the elusive quality of sound and its tendency to fade away over time — a characteristic Norie plans to represent with several different soundtracks that will be accessed depending on the location of the viewer. The video component also explores the theme of layers or multiplicity: It will literally be “a video within a video.”
Currently in the midst of an eight-week joint residency at MacDowell, Maria and Norie are hard at work, weaving together loose threads and uniting disparate elements to create a new reality. Which makes you think that maybe they’re not so out of sync with one another after all.