An Interview with DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) by Elena Glasberg,
"Antarctica Remix"
(page 3 of 4)
You are intrigued by Antarctica's geopolitical exception—its lack
of indigenous people and its never-nationalized status under the 1959
Antarctic Treaty System. I see this reflected in the way the title of your
installation playfully echoes the title of a 1981 novel by John Calvin
Bachelor, The People's Republic of Antarctica. Do you see
Antarctica as an exception to global politics? What vision of propaganda
and history inspired the "Manifesto for a People's Republic of
Antarctica" installation, the marvelous poster series in
particular?
As Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud's nephew and coiner of the term
"public relations") knew, 20th century advertising was the hidden
architecture holding capitalism and communism together. Everyone had to
get their message out. Whether it was Stalin who said that "engineers
are poets of the soul" or Chairman Mao, who put teachers in chains and
paraded them as false prophets, this kind of stay-on-message-type ethos
dominated the media discourse of every nation.
With my print design and film projects, I simply ask the question:
what if the nation state went away? What centrifuge would we all then
call home? What would be the point of looking at the state as a kind of
generative architecture? Who would be commissioning the designs, who
would be fostering the arts? The answer: corporations. I use the ironic
motif of propaganda from the British East India company and some of the
corporate sponsorships of exploration/high endurance sports as
examples.
The revolution for the U.S. after the fall of the Berlin Wall was
untrammeled capitalism. Look around and see what it's done for us! The
only competing ideology at this point is radical Islam. I'm not so sure
that people would like to embrace Sharia economics, but if they look at
the Middle East, there's lots of solid banking going on (unlike Wall
Street this week). I guess you could say that my work is kind of an
aesthetic futures market where any sound can be you; that's what
sampling is about. The Terra Nova and "Manifesto for a People's
Republic of Antarctica" projects are mirrors held up to a world that is
melting. I don't know about you, but I think it's a pretty strange
mirror to see oneself in. I read John Calvin Bathelor's book and enjoyed
it, but aside from "sampling" the title (I do this a lot!), there's not
much of a connection, except that his book is a meditation on the end of
norms of governance.
I'm struck by the influence of Al Gore's documentary, An
Inconvenient Truth, on subsequent representation of the Antarctic.
Most reporting on Antarctica these days tends toward the catastrophic:
ice melting, penguins starving, and now oil prices so high that
scientific research programs themselves are financially threatened with
extinction. And much of this reporting relies on how it's communicated
graphically—I'm thinking in particular of the computer simulations of
melting ice sheets in a pristine and remote Antarctic and the resultant
rises in sea levels of urban locations. Do you see your work in such a
context of politicized—or catastrophic—simulation? What's your main
message amid this noise?
I always try to get people to think about conceptual frames of
reference: context is important in my work, and so is content. How do
you establish an uneasy tension between context and content when
everything can be remixed and changed, and there's no final "version" of
anything? In my film Terra Nova, that kind of graphic design imprint is
crucial to how the story is told. If you look at the early arctic
expeditions led by Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott, you can only
think: wouldn't it have been great if they had satellite footage to tell
them they weren't that deep into the ice, and to compare some different
routes to get out of the drift their ship was caught in?
In his infamous The Worst Journey in The World, Apsley Cherry
Garrad writes: "Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most
isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised." I think
that is one of the most succinct ways one could put this simple
observation. Melting ice sheets look cool, but then again, so do solar
flares on the surface of the sun. They're both harmful . . . but hey . .
. art makes things look cool.
Terra Nova debuted at the democratic convention in August as part
of Dialog:City, in Denver. Barack Obama presumably saw it. What would
you like him to see, to respond to, and to promote in his election
platform (and possible administration)?
I really think it's time to say goodbye to the 20th century. So yes,
having the convention as a focal point for the contemporary art scene
was a breath of fresh air for me. I really liked premiering my film at
the Denver Opera House. The Colorado art scene is a lot more progressive
than the one in New York!
I think Obama will probably be one of the greenest presidents since
Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House. The Republicans went
crazy, but in hindsight, it was really, really, really cool. I think of
Terra Nova as a reflection site—a location for the politics of
perception that we use to look at the environment.
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