An Interview with DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) by Elena Glasberg,
"Antarctica Remix"
(page 2 of 4)
How are you creating the sounds of Antarctica? What is the
technical process and how does it reflect Antarctic representation, its
challenges, and its history?
My gallery installation is loosely based on the "false" story of
Frederick A. Cook, who claimed to have discovered the North Pole in
1909. He produced and starred in a self-promotional docudrama, The
Truth about the Pole, in which he portrayed himself as a
heroic adventurer. I think it's hilarious—I repurpose this kind of
thing, and flip it into Southern perspective. Who owns the ice? Who owns
the memory of the ice? My composition for the installation at the
galleries is based on gamelan music from the idea of "shadow theater"
mixed with string arrangements taken from my score to Terra Nova.
Debussy after all, was inspired by gamelan, and I guess you could say
ambient electronic music is about as "impressionist" composition as you
can get. I like the idea of ambiguity. It keeps you on your feet, makes
you think about paradox and the digital world of relativity we live in
today.
When I went to Antarctica, I wanted to be in a place where there was
essentially a fresh perspective, and where I could really think about
how to interact with the environment in a way that would free up some of
the issues that drive normal hip hop. The sounds in my projects come
from nature: wind, water, the noise of feet walking on ice . . . my project
takes those sounds and uses them as an acoustic palette. I mixed and
remixed the material to the point that bass lines come from wind and
water movement, and the sound of human breath becomes a motif made into
a kind of strange pattern.
The score for Terra Nova was written in a much more
conventional way, but that's why I like to say I'm into paradox. You
could almost say that the score for Terra Nova is
neo-Baroque.
The subtile for Terra Nova references Ralf Vaughan
Williams' "Sinfonia Antartica #7" (begun in 1949 and completed in 1952).
What do you think of the original "Sinfonia," as music and as an
historical artifact of an Antarctic vision?
Vaughan Williams, it's well documented, was pre-occupied with the
concept of the "end of empire" and the end of World War II. It was a
period when the concept of the British Commonwealth needed to be
re-examined. Gandhi's Indian liberation project and the Indian
independence in 1947 must have really been foremost on the minds of
composers from that generation, who needed to give the British a way of
looking forward to reconstruction. What had the war been about except
imperial ambition? Let's not forget that "Sinfonia," the first
composition to really engage Antarctica, started as the score to the
film Scott of the Antarctic (1948, dir. Frend). By making Scott
someone who had died in service to the Empire, the film really set the
tone for how the twilight of the British Empire needed to look for new
heroes.
The Vaughan Williams soundtrack, like the original music composed by
Joseph Carl Breil for D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, was a
pastiche of themes and motifs that would speak to a film audience. I
wanted to update the same concept with turntables and digital media. I
really don't think of music, film, and art as separate. There is a
seamless connection; it's the creative mind at work.
Your work engages in and emerges through tropes and modes of
globalism, the Internet specifically. Yet you also DJ for live
audiences. How does Antarctica figure within your view of a global
audience?
So much of my work comes from the hard-learned truth that "collage"
speaks across many borders, cultures, and yes, economic classes. If you
want to deal with hip hop and then give a lecture at a place like Yale
or Harvard, you really have to be prepared to speak in academic pidgin
as much as be able to flow in the club scene. I never really thought of
myself as "separate" from the art and academic works that I create. My
books, shows, and exhibitions are all driven by the obsession I have
with saying that multiculturalism, market forces, and the basic fabric
of "The Enlightenment" are interconnected. One of my favorite recent
books is Capital and Language by Christian Marazzi. You can look
at his concept of new forms of "hoarding" as a way to engage some kind
of logic of culturally produced "value." I always am astounded at how
little the art world understands the kind of cultural economy that DJ
culture emerges from.
The 19th century German composer Richard Wagner came up with a term,
"gesamkunstwerk," that referred to a kind of unified approach to the
arts that integrated the visual with music and theater. This to me is
one of the best ways of thinking about contemporary multimedia, where
there is a real synthesis between the role of the writer, the composer,
and the visual image. Nothing, after Wagner's concept of
"gesamkunstwerk," exists in a vacuum: whether our culture is taken from
youTube videos or material posted online from cell phones by soldiers
in Iraq, we exist in a world where "documents" act as a kind of
testimony. But once something is recorded, it's basically a file waiting
to be manipulated. That's what links the concept of the remix to
everything going on these days—truth itself is a remix. Anyway, it's all
about a new kind of relativism.
Your work speaks to a wide variety of audiences, purposefully and
joyously erupting into places not usually associated (variously) with DJ
culture, beats, aural sophistication, and academic-style
intellectualization. Where do you place Antarctica within your work and
audience?
I have a degree of comfort with new places in this hyper-turbulent
and digitally abstract contemporary life. Life is hybrid and always has
been. It's just that digital media is making us realize that
multiculturalism is not about the "end of Western culture;"
multiculturalism is actually giving Western culture a place in whatever
else has been going on. Which is healthy . . . I just roll with it
all.
I really think that the distinctions that defined most of the 20th
century are almost gone. Technology has moved far more quickly to
transform our social structures than anyone could have anticipated. DJ
culture accepts and celebrates this kind of phenomenon precisely because
it's not linked to the production of objects—it's obsessed with
continuous transformation. And that's where I live: in total flux.
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