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?
