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.
