This interview was conducted over email from July through October, 2008.

DJ Spooky, trailer for Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica

You recently completed two multimedia projects: the film Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, and "Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica," a gallery installation (at Robert Miller Gallery and Irvine Fine Arts). Both projects incorporate field recordings and audio samples from your visit to Antarctica, mixed with electronic beats and other visual materials. How did your conception of Antarctica as a place interact with your embodied presence? What was the most surprising aspect of being in Antarctica?

We chartered a boat, a Russian ice breaker called "The Academic Ioffe," and traveled there by way of South America. We went to several islands and ice fields that were near the Antarctic peninsula but a little further down on the continent. I'll be going back in a while to check out more of the interior. The next time I go, I'm going to try and get to the Lake Vostok base.

The most surprising thing about Antarctica was the stench of penguin shit. You can smell it a mile or so out in the water! I'm always "embodied" (I always tend to mix that up with "embedded" these days anyway), so there wasn't the conflicted sense of spatial issues that seems to haunt a lot of the discourse about what physical performance is all about in a digital context. I live and remember it all.

How do you see your mixed modes of approach—embodiment and digitized representation—in the context of the history of representing the (arguably) most mediated place on earth?

Everything I do is about paradox, paradox makes life fun. I think that people need to "hear" Antarctica because it is at the edge of the world. The phrase "mixed modes of approach" is a good one . . . of course, the dominant theme in DJ culture is "the mix," so there are some salient linkages there. The technical terms "heterodoxy" or "heterogeneity" both find a solid home in me and my work; I celebrate that kind of thing. One day, a software we use and the life we live will blur. It's kind of already happened. But that's why I go to places like Antarctica.

Take New York City for example. If I have a conversation at a café, someone will put it on a blog. If I walk down the street, someone puts photos of it on flickr. It's irritating, but hey . . . it's the way we live now. You could argue that New York City is probably one of the most mediated places on earth. Antarctica represents a place mediated by science—it's literally almost another world. Some of my favorite science fiction books, like Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica and Crawford Kilian's IceQuake, deal with some of the same themes: science, art and the weird un-worldliness of the ice terrain. My Terra Nova and "Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica" projects are in the same tradition. Music from the edge of the physical environment and music from the core of the urban landscape: Watch them collide in paradox.

How did Antarctica emerge into your world? Was it through images? Fiction? Or the study of historic exploration figures?

I used to watch old films whenever I could, and some of my most formative film experiences were George Méliès' 1902 The Conquest of the North and Frederick A. Cook's 1912 The Truth About the Pole. These two films are about the opposite side of the planet from Antarctica, but there's a kind of strange dualism to them that was really influential. Like the Lumiere brothers, Cook's film tried to portray itself as realistic, almost like a documentary. Méliès, on the other hand, started out as a magician who wanted to apply magic technique to film. The two films are so different, but they're both amazingly, eerily prescient about how discovery and the "voyager's path" would then take on almost surreal proportions.

There's a similar motif that runs through my Terra Nova and "Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica" projects. They both use found footage, print-design, and propaganda to show how exploration at the edge of the world is a prism to view how nations look at one another, and how art itself is a highly politicized medium. I guess you could say I'm inspired as much by the scene in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, where Captain Nemo sails his submarine to the Antarctic sea shelf, as I am by the film 90 Degrees South by cinematographer Herbert G. Ponting, who was one of the first people to get footage from Antarctica.

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.

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.

Antarctica and in particular the South Pole have been sought after by proponents of U.S. and European imperialism since the early 1900s. Authors populated the unknown south with wishful fantasies of lost races, arable lands, and mineral wealth. Postcolonial nations such as Argentina, Chile, and even Malaysia have fought to be included among the arbiters of Antarctica's possible riches. How do you negotiate nationalism and the history of imperialism in your own approach to the territory?

You really have to think about Antarctica as a "possible terrain"—it's a surface we project on, but it doesn't reflect us back. There's always going to be conflict over resources as long as people think everything is completely limited. The weird thing about the 21st century is that we have perspective. That's something the warring empires of the past didn't have. We have history, comparative science, and above all, a sense of urgency with regard to global warming. And guess what: we still can't get it together.

Two of the best recent films dealing with Antarctica, Werner Herzog's Encounters at The End of The World and the anti-whaling film At the Edge of the World, both have this kind of "rebel/misfit scientist" take on the expatriate community that lives in Antarctica. The cracks in the mirror are where some of the best images are to be found. Antarctica, for me, is just a really big crack in the way we look at the land claims of the "great nations." I think that my film project is a cinema-scape in the same tradition of Nam Jun Paik, John Cage's "Imaginary Landscape," or Edgar Varese and Scriabin's visual essays turned into sound. Imperialism is such a concrete process: take the land, brainwash the natives, make the people back home think it's all being done in their name. The problem with the 21st century for that kind of schemata is that no one really believes it any more. It's just one fiction of many.

I tend to think that that's a good thing . . . it's time for a fresh kaleidoscope! We need more paradox than we can possibly know right now. And Antarctica is the place to manifest that kind of paradox. After all, it's the end of the world. I want us to look over the edge . . ..

The majority of people on earth will never come near Antarctica. How do you want them to think of their relation to this remote and highly mediated territory? Do you feel that you're operating with a (excuse the phrase) blank screen, or do preconceptions of the region cloud collective action?

I think it goes back to how people "hear" Antarctica, a question that lingers over this interview. Unmoored, unleashed, free floating—sampling derives its sense of free cut and paste aesthetics from the interplay of the "rip, mix, and burn" scenario of the 21st century's information economy. But there are so many cultural resonances that kick in when we think about "appropriation art."

I love to throw in allusions and word play—it mirrors what I do with sound, so excuse the aside: In 1964, Ralph Ellison, one of my favorite writers, read a statement at the Library of Congress about the possibility of an artform made of fragments. The lecture was called "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," and basically it was a manifesto about a series of poems and music that was made into a "mix" of music that influenced him. It was kind of a "sonic memorial" made of fragments from artists and composers as diverse as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Mahalia Jackson. The selection was meant to be a literary scenario that evoked music as a kind of text. Of the jazz legends Ellison invoked in his discussion, he simply wrote that "the end of all this discipline and technical mastery was the desire to express an affirmative way of life through its musical tradition . . .. Life could be harsh, loud and wrong if it wished, but they lived it fully, and when they expressed their attitude toward the world it was with a fluid style that reduced the chaos of living to form."

As an artist, writer, and musician, this kind of hybridity is something that drives my work. I'm inspired by the destruction of old, boring ways of thinking and feeling, by the casting into the flames of obsolence all the stupid old categories that people use to hold the world back from the interplay of uncontrolled "mixing." Yeah, I say: we need to mix and remix everything. There is no final version of anything once it's digital. Is this a mirror we can hold up to society in the era of information overload? DJ mixes, freeware, open source media, yeah—they say it is possible.

Antarctica is a realm of possibility because, put simply, very few people are aware of its story. That in itself is a rare and elusive quality that the beginning of the 21st century has brought front and center into modern perspective: there's strength in invisibility. You have to think of the landscape and the way artists interact with it. Take John Cage's "Imaginary Landscape" series for instance, which experimented with the idea of invisible networks, and featured records playing frequencies, percussion instruments, "found sounds," embedded, recursive rhythmic structures, and various kinds of precompositional chance operations.

I think that is what resonates with Antarctica for me: the space to be sonically free. After all, it's the only place on Earth with no government. What's the soundtrack to that?