Known best for their consciousness-altering “audio walks,” the Cana­dian artists and co-conspirators Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are once again con­jur­ing strange magic.

In this work, Cardiff and Miller engage directly with the polit­i­cal. “The Killing Machine” (2007) is drawn from the artists’s strong views against cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, com­plete with a sound­track full of cin­e­matic dis­so­nance and an eerily roboti­cized cham­ber and drew the par­tic­i­pant into the work through their acti­va­tion of the instal­la­tion via push­ing a red button.

The Killing Machine, is inspired by Kafka’s well known short story The Penal Colony. This work is an open, scaffold-like struc­ture. Installed in a dark­ened space, a spot­light shines on a sinister-looking dentist’s chair with thick leather straps, draped with a dirty pink fun fur. The action begins by press­ing a red but­ton: A mega­phone cir­cles, while a flash­light on a robotic arm seems to inspect an invis­i­ble body in the chair. Another robotic arm appears with pneu­matic nee­dles that shoot out and prod the thin air, assault­ing the absent body, while a mourn­ful accom­pa­ni­ment of strings is inter­rupted by a drum­stick bash­ing o an elec­tric gui­tar. A disco ball twirling over­head com­pletes the soli­tary spec­ta­cle. Like a cellar-bound lunatic’s appalling inven­tion, dragged straight from a sci-fi hor­ror flick, this piece is rid­dled with lit­er­ary or cin­e­matic analogies.

But, whereas pre­vi­ous works of this type seem to stage a site of mem­ory or his­tor­i­cal inci­dent, The Killing Machine is a spec­ta­cle for its own sake, cre­at­ing a timely alle­gory both of the con­tin­ued use of the death penalty in the USA and of the obscene banal­ity of torture.

“Just have a seat and lie back. There there, just relax. This won’t hurt a bit. Let me just fas­ten up these straps.”