Copyright Criminals - a Documentary by Ben Frantzen and Kembrew Mcleod
I'm in this movie, and I think that they did an excellent job. They have many friends and peers of mine - Jeff Chang, Chuck D (who appeared on my album "Drums of Death"), Clyde Stubblefiend, the drummer for James Brown, and many others. I HIGHLY recommend this film for anyone who is interested in digital culture.!
Silent film scores were grandiloquent, meant to heighten what we saw on screen. Mr. Miller's score, by contrast, deflects our responses, then alters them. A hip-hop drum beat pulses. (It sounds African and urban American.) A wash of industrial sound is joined by bells and cymbals; a dissonant violin; blues fragments. These are the sounds of history and racial complexity that Griffith tried to suppress.
– Margo Jefferson, New York Times, July 8, 2005
Arguably no one is more responsible for propagating and embodying the idea of the deejay as "artist" than DJ Spooky, whose ambitious, elaborate, often hypnotic soundscapes have been notable as much for their eclectic imagination as for their post-modern intellectualism.
- Chicago Tribune
This man is as brainy as a Mensa meeting, sharp as Zorro's sword, funny as Falstaff. He is Einstein with a better haircut, a streetwise black Tolstoy, a revved-up renaissance man for the digital age, obsessed with art, information and digital technology. -Sunday Star Times – Aukland, NZ
Notes for Paul D. Miller's “Rebirth of a Nation” - remix of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “Birth
of a Nation.”
By Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid
Travel. Big picture small frame, so what’s
the name of the game? Symbol and synecdoche, sign and signification,
all at once, the digital codes become a reflection, a mirror permutation
of the nation…. Where to go? What to do to get there?
Sometimes the best way to get an idea across is to simply tell
it as a story. It’s been a while since late one autumn afternoon
in 1896 Georges Méliès was filming a late afternoon
Paris crowd caught in the ebb and flow of the city’s traffic.
Méliès was in the process of filming an omnibus
as it came out of a tunnel, and his camera jammed. He tried for
several moments to get it going again, but with no luck. After
a couple of minutes he got it working again, and the camera’s
lens caught a hearse going by. It was an accident that went unoticed
until he got home. When the film was developed and projected it
seemed as if the bus morphed into a funeral hearse and back to
its original form again. In the space of what used to be called
“actualités” – real contexts reconfigured
into stories that the audiences could relate to – a simple
opening and closing of a lens had placed the viewer in several
places and times simultaneously. In the space of one random error,
Méliès created what we know of today as the “cut”
– words, images, sounds flowing out the lens projection
would deliver, like James Joyce used to say “sounds like
a river.” Flow, rupture, and fragmentation – all seamlessly
bound to the viewers perspectival architecture of film and sound,
all utterly malleable – in the blink of an eye space and
time as the pre-industrial culture had known it came to an end.
Whenever you look at an image, there’s a ruthless logic
of selection that you have to go through to simply to create a
sense of order. The end product on this palimpsest of perception
is a composite of all the thoughts and actions you sift through
over the last several micro-seconds – a soundbite reflection
of a process that’s a new update of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein or the German proto Expressionist 1920 film “Der
Golem,” but this time it’s the imaginary creature
is made of the interplay fragments of time, code, and (all puns
intended) memory and flesh. The eyes stream data to the brain
through something like 2 million fiber bundles of nerves. Consider
the exponentional aspects of perception when you multiply this
kind of density by the fact that not only does the brain do this
all the time, but the millions of bits of information streaming
through your mind at any moment have to be coordinated and like
the slightest rerouting is, like the hearse and omnibus of Méliès
film accident, any shift in the traffic of information can create
not only new thoughts, but new ways of thinking. Literally. Non-fiction,
check the meta-contradiction… Back in the early portion
of the 20th century this kind of emotive fragmentation implied
a crisis of representation, and it was filmakers, not Dj’s
who were on the cutting edge of how to create a kind of subjective
intercutting of narratives and times – there’s even
the famous story of how President Woodrow Wilson when he saw the
now legendary amount of images and narrative jump cuts that were
in turn cut and spliced up in D.W. Griffiths’s film classic
“Birth of a Nation” called the style of ultra-montage
“like writing history with lightning.” I wonder what
he would have said of Grand Master Flash’s 1981 classic
“Adventures on the Wheels of Steel?”
Film makers like D.W. Griffith, Dziga Vertov, Oscar Michaux, and
Sergei Eisenstein (especially with his theory of “dialectal
montage” or “montage of attractions” that created
a kind of subjective intercutting of multiple layers of stories
within stories) were forging stories for a world just coming out
of the throes of World War I. A world which, like ours, was becoming
increasingly inter-connected, and filled with stories of distant
lands, times and places – a place where cross cutting allowed
the presentation not only of parallel actions occurring simultaneously
in separate spatial dimensions, but also parallel actions occurring
on separate temporal planes – in the case of Griffith’s
“Birth of a Nation,” four stories at once –
and helped convey the sense of density that the world was confronting…
Griffith was known as “the Man Who Invented Hollywood,”
and the words he used to describe his style of composition -“intra-frame
narrative” or the “cut-in” the “cross-cut”
– staked out a space in America’s linguistic terrain
that hasn’t really been explored too much. Griffith’s
films were mainly used as propaganda – “Birth of a
Nation” was used as a recruitment film for the Ku Klux Klan
at least up until the mid 1960’s, and other films like “Intolerance”
were commercial failures, and the paradox of his cultural stance
versus the technical expertise that he brought to film, is still
mirrored in Hollywood to this day.
But if you compare that kind of flux to stuff to Dj mixes, you
can see a similar logic at work: it’s all about selection
of sound as narrative. I guess that’s travelling by synecdoche.
It’s a process of sifting through the narrative rubble of
a phenomenon that conceptual artist Adrian Piper liked to call
the “indexical present:” “I use the notion of
the ‘indexical present’ to describe the way in which
I attempt to draw the viewer into a direct relationship with the
work, to draw the viewer into a kind of self critical standpoint
which encourages reflection on one’s own responses to the
work…”
To name, to call, to upload, to download… So I’m sitting
here and writing - creating a new time zone out of widely dispersed
geographic regions – reflect and reflecting on the same
ideas using the net to focus our attention on a world rapidly
moving into what I like to call “prosthetic realism.”
Sight and sound, sign and signification: the travel at this point
becomes mental, and as with Griffith’s hyper dense technically
prescient intercuts, it’s all about how you play with the
variables that creates the artpiece. If you play, you get something
out of the experience. If you don’t, like Griffith –
the medium becomes a reinforcement of what’s already there,
and or as one critic, Iris Barry said a long time ago of Griffith’s
“Intolerance”: “history itself seems to pour
like a cataract across the screen…”
Like an acrobat drifting through the topologies of codes, glyphs
and signs that make up the fabric of my everyday life, I like
to flip things around. With a culture based on stuff like Emergency
Broadcast Network hyper edited new briefs, Ninja Tune dance moguls
Cold Cut’s “7 Minutes of Madness” remix of Eric
B and Rakim’s “Paid in Full” to Grandmaster
Flash’s “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel”
to later excursions into geographic, cultural, and temporal dispersion
like MP3lit.com – contemporary 21st Century aesthetics needs
to focus on how to cope with the immersion we experience on a
daily level – a density that Sergei Eisenstein back in 1929
spoke of when he was asked about travel and film:“the hieroglyphic
language of the cinema is capable of expressing any concept, any
idea of class, any political or tactical slogan, without recourse
to the help of suspect dramatic or psychological past” Does
this mean that we make our own films as we live them? Travelling
without moving. It’s something even Aristotle’s “Unmoved
Mover” wouldn’t have thought possible. But hey, like
I always say, “who’s counting?”
DJ Spooky and DMC of RUN DMC at Soul Festival, Jakarta, Indonesia! 10/31/2009
Copyright Criminals - a Documentary by Ben Frantzen and Kembrew Mcleod
ORDER NOW!!! 
OUT NOW! DJ Spooky's "Sound Unbound"
CREATION REBEL MIX CD on Trojan Records
DJ Spooky has produced material on the new Yoko Ono album.
RHYTHM SCIENCE:
DJ Spooky in Berlin 2008
