THE IMAGINARY APP
A new book about Apps and the way they have changed everything! Featuring essays and articles by writers, artists, and theoreticians.
Anthology Edited By Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky and Svitlana Matviyenko. // ORDER HERE
OUT NOW!
DJ Spooky has participated in two new book projects.
One is Green Patriot Posters. DJ Spooky's Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica graphic design prints are included along with several of his friends like Shep Fairey and others. Make your own poster manifesto for a better world!!
greenpatriotposters.org Edited by Edward Morris and Dmitri Siegel
// BUY THE BOOK!
DJ Spooky also has participated in renowned photographer Lyle Owerko's new book "The Boombox Project" on the history of boomboxes.
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.!
DJ SPOOKY & SMITHSONIAN
ROMARE BEARDEN: A BLACK ODYSSEY APP
DJ Spooky has contributed music and narrated the new App from The Smithsonian Museum traveling retrospective of Romare Bearden for iOS and Android operating systems.
www.sites.si.edu/romarebearden/apps
Kathmandu International Art Festival 2012
This is an installation by Jyoti Duwati based on a composition I wrote called "Ice Synchronism" for the Kathmandu Arts Festival. Pretty wild to see so much ice in the Himalayan Mountains melting.
MELTING ICE 10 x 10 Ft.
Ice blocks
Video projection, music
TERRA NOVA: Sinfonia Antarctica
In December 2007 and January 2008 Paul D. Miller aka went to Antarctica to shoot a film and make a large scale multimedia performance work that will be an acoustic portrait of a rapidly changing continent called Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica. Sinfonia Antarctica transforms Miller’s first person encounter with the harsh, dynamic landscape of Antarctica into multimedia portraits with music composed from the different geographies that make up the land mass. It's about the environment, sound, hip hop, electronic music and what it means to be a composer in the 21st century.
Daejeon Museum of Art: Antarctic Rhythms
남극의 리듬 Antarctic Rhythms
세계적인 아티스트이자 <프로젝트 대전 2012: 에네 르기> 참여작가인 폴 D. 밀러는 세계 음악계에서는 DJ Spooky로 더 많이 알려져 있다. <프로젝트 대전 2012: 에네르기>에서는 남극 탐험가들의 족적과 남 극을실제로촬영한영상들과그의음악을함께편집 한 <북/남 NORTH/SOUTH>을 출품하였다. 이번 공 연에서는 현악 연주자(바이올린, 첼로) 2인과 함께 얼 음/빙하와 남극 대륙에 관한 음악들로 구성된 <남극 의 리듬 Antarctic Rhythms>이라는 환상적인 공연을 선보인다.
DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid라는 예명으도 잘 알려진 폴 D. 밀러(Paul D. Miller)는 1970년 워싱턴 D.C.의 중산층 가정에서 태어나, 미국 메인 주 Bowdoin College에서 프랑스 문학과 철학을 전공하 였다. 작곡가이자 멀티미디어 아티스트인 폴 D. 밀러 는 저술 작업도 활발히 해오고 있으며, 최근에는 남극 을 주제로 한 책
<빙하의 책(The Book of Ice)>을 출간하였다. 2007년 베니스비엔날레 아프리카관에 비 디오 설치작 '뉴욕은 지금(New York is Now)'으로 초대된 것을 비롯하여, 휘트니비엔날레, 독일 쾰른 루 드비히뮤지엄, 쿤스탈레비엔나, 앤디워홀뮤지엄 등 세 계 굴지의 미술관에서 작품이 전시되었다. 음악분야에 서는 헤비메탈 그룹 메탈리카, 현대 작곡가 스티브 라 이치, 류이치 사카모토, 지휘자 피에르 불레즈, 전위예 술가 오노 요코, 전위 음악가 로리 앤더슨, 데이빗 번, 모비(Moby), 영화감독 베르나르도 베르톨루치, 그리고소설가폴오스터등여러장르의예술가들과 협연하였다.
[website-english][website-korean]
Ice Music: Paul D. Miller / DJ Spooky
September 30, 2012 - January 20, 2013
William and Anna Jane Schlossman Gallery, General Exhibition
”In celebration of the opening of Katherine Kilbourne Center for Creativity we are thrilled to host an exhibition, performance, public discussion, and full public programming around the internationally known artist DJ Spooky. This is an innovative, new media show that presents prints, banners, and a video and sound installation. This project combines several areas of DJ Spooky’s work—the writing “Book of Ice;” his multimedia work “Terra Nova” which draws on composer Ralph Vaughn Williams’ ‘Sinfonia Antarctica,’ and Spooky’s graphic art project “Manifesto for a People’s Republic of Antarctica.”
Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer who creates bridges between sound art and contemporary visual culture.
Through music, photographs and film stills from his journey to the Antarctic, along with original artworks, and re-appropriated archival materials, Miller uses Antarctica as an entry point for contemplating humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
Based on The Book of Ice—part fictional manifesto, part history, and part science book—this exhibition combines video footage of past performances with graphics and dynamic data visualizations related to climate change in the Earth’s polar regions
Ai Weiwei - Ordos 100 REMIX by DJ Spooky
鬼城
This is the trailer for a remix project by DJ Spooky based on a modern Chinese "ghost city." The Ordos 100 project in Northern China's "Inner Mongolia" that Aie Weiwei designed has stood empty and unfinished for several years. The project was curated by Herzog & De Meuron Architects in Switzerland in conjunction with Ai Weiwei's Fake Studio, based in Beijing. 100 architects were flown to Ordos to create 100 villas in an artificial city. This is the remix by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky.
For DJ Spooky film lends itself to appropriation and collage, much like the urban landscape. DJ Spooky has taken the concept of the Situationist concept of "psychogeography," to arrive at a kind of contemporary "dérive" - an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, where an individual travels where the subtle aesthetic contours of "free" space and time. He has applied that concept to the original version of the film and taken the position of "Director as DJ" to remix the Ordos 100 project.
鬼城
Ghost town
鄂尔多斯
声音+架构 ==> "sound + framework"
声音+架构+建筑 ==> Sound + framework + architect
In 2007 Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky was commissioned by Art Center Nabi in Seoul, Korea and the Korean American Film Festival in New York to re-score this classic film with a 21st century soundtrack.
In March 2011 Miller worked with renowned Korean violinists Eugene Park, Sean Lee, and experimental cellist Okkyung Lee to create a new string quartet score based on Miller’s compositions for Madame Freedom that was edited live using his innovative iPad/iPhone mixing software.
DJ Spooky’s original scoring of Donbass Symphony – Enthusiasm was commissioned and presented by Creative Association
«Cultural Enlightenment» St. Petersburg, Russia
Творческое Объединение Культурное Просветление и Ди-джей Спуки представляют
A rescore of Dziga Vertov's first sound film
USSR - Moscow, 1930
Artist Statement:
This is a collage of historical material that should give the reader some insight into why I like Vertov - I like to think of the way he set up a dialectical tension between "real" life and its documentation in film as a predecessor to our modern vimeo/youtube/flickr world of ubiquitous cinema. [read more]
Jean Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet" at
The Guggenheim Museum, October 2010
A rescore and dance interpretation of Jean Cocteau’s classic film.
The Poet is a liar who always speaks the truth
Jean Cocteau
1930 : 50 MIN : BLACK AND WHITE FILM
Coup de Foudre:
With my re-score of “The Blood of a Poet” (1930) I didn’t want to simply create a new music composition. I wanted to look at gesture, performance, and above all, how artists create material that is trans-media specific. One could argue that “Blood of a Poet” wasn’t a Surrealist film in the same context as Buñuel's material. But what it does evoke is a milieu where poetry becomes imagist at every level, in his film, one can see the direct connection between the “sub-conscious” impulses of an artist who is trying to navigate the rapidly changing terrains of the early 20th century’s industrialization of the collective imagination, but to pull lyricism from the standardization of aesthetics that artist groups as diverse as the Surrealists, the Futurists, the Dadaist and others were fighting against, is something that our era of Facebook, youtube, and the endlessly changing landscape of the internet foster. What is the center of our culture but the imagination? It’s more powerful than ever because so many people are sharing the same thoughts, ideas, sounds, and memories. One could argue that digital media inherited Surrealism’s willful breaks with reality precisely because digital code is so mutable. That’s where Dj Culture, film, and poetry collide in the 21st century. Digital media is the hidden poetry of our era. My re-score/remix of “The Blood of a Poet” explores these issues from the collision of sound, digital media, and contemporary choreography.
The Nauru Elegies: The Idea of an Island by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
The Nauru Elegies is a music composition and museum/gallery installation by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky based on an economic, musical, and data aesthetics driven research into the conditions of The Republic of Nauru that posits the micro-state as a reflection site of some of the core issues facing 21st century digital modernity.
The Republic of Nauru is a small island in the South Pacific Ocean. It is the world's smallest independent state and, at its core, represents a place at the most remote extreme of the planet. Its seemingly utopic geography and landscape stages a dystopic economy and society. It was, by consensus of several “Great Powers”, used as a raw resource until there was literally, nothing left. It is anticipated that the phosphate reserves will be completely exhausted before 2050. Despite this, the unemployment rate currently stands at 90%.
The Nauru Elegies: The Idea of an Island is a technical synthesis composed and conceived by Paul D. Miller of a live string ensemble playing his compositions, projected high-definition video footage Miller recorded on Nauru, digital animation and live internet feed. It is an orchestration of content retrieved and processed in multiple localities including research in New York City, documentation in Nauru and performed by a string quartet that is sampled "live" using Dj Spooky's iPhone/iPad software. It is a statement of economic, technological and media processes in the 21st century that are exponentially progressing to a more dematerialized and delocalized state.
DJ Spooky/Paul D. Miller’s large scale multimedia performance work will is an acoustic portrait of a rapidly changing continent. Sinfonia Antarctica transforms Miller’s first person encounter with the harsh, dynamic landscape into multimedia portraits with music composed from the different geographies that make up the land mass.
DJ Spooky presents
North/South at the Robert Miller Gallery
Robert Miller Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition of the work of Paul Miller. In 2008 Miller went to Antarctica to shoot a film about the sound of ice, and ended up creating an installation out of the journey. For Robert Miller Gallery, Paul Miller recasts the epic detritus of the art and other cultural worlds as skillfully handled archival video samplings, digital prints, and drawings, calling into question the value of appropriation and the status of the copy.
Ghost World: A Story in Sound for the Venice Biennal 2007
by Paul D. Miller
Brian Eno once famously remarked that the problem with computers
is that there isn't enough Africa in them. I kind of think that
its the opposite: they're bringing the ideals of Africa: after
all, computers are about connectivity, shareware, a sense of global
discussion about topics and issues, the relentless density of
info overload, and above all the willingness to engage and discuss
it all - that's something you could find on any street corner
in Africa.
I just wanted to highlight the point: Digital Africa is here,
and has been here for a while. This isn't "retro" -
it's about the future.
This is an essay I wrote to accompany my remix of D.W. Griffith's
1915 "Birth of a Nation." Griffith's film has been a
historical object of fascination for me for a long while - it's
been one of the defining images of America in the 20th century.
As we enter the 21st Century it sometimes helps to know like the
philosopher Santayana said so long ago, that "those who do
not understand the past are doomed to repeat it." "Birth
of a Nation" focuses on how America needed to create a fiction
of African American culture in tune with the fabrication of "whiteness"
that undergirded American thought throughout most of the last
several centuries: it floats out in the world of cinema as an
enduring albeit totally racist - epic tale of an America that,
in essence, never existed. The Ku Klux Klan still uses this film
as a recruiting device and it's considered to be an American "cinema
classic" despite the racist content. By remixing the film
along the lines of dj culture, I hoped to create a counter-narrative,
one where the story implodes on itself, one where new stories
arise out the ashes of that explosion. These are some of the images
that are taken from the film and well... you can see, it's a bit
hectic. "Rebirth of A Nation" has been shown in work-in-progress
form at San Francisco's "Other Minds Music Festival"
in the fall of 2002, and at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary
Art and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in the spring
of 2003. There will be one more of these events, at the Hirshhorn
Museum in Washington, DC on September 6th. The full live performance
will be commissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival, The Spoleto
Festival USA and The Festival D'Automne in Paris to tour as a
live/film performance during the '04-'05 season. It will travel
as a museum show and will be released as a limited edition DVD
as well.
A couple of years ago, a Saudi oil minister made what has become
one of the more prophetic statements to come out of the Middle
East in a long time: “The Stone Age didn’t end for
lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world
runs out of oil.” It was a lament, an acknowledgement that
a day of reckoning was coming that would change the global balance
of wealth and power.
Harry Smith is probably one of 20th Century America's greatest
hidden treasures, and the Harry Smith Archive remix project is
a place where you can really see that the idea of collage, archival
materials, and found film footage came together in one of the
more dynamic minds of the artworld. My piece here was printed
on a large poster print and is reproduced as an interpretation
of a song from the Harry Smith Archive by Blind Lemon Jefferson
called "Prison Cell Blues" - it's a haiku for the people
the American Dream has left in a deeply uncertain limbo. Kind
of like Hurricane Katrina's impact on African American life in
the Deep South. Blind Lemon Jefferson influenced artists as diverse
as Lead Belly (another blues legend) and the Beatles who recorded
their song "Matchbox Blues" as a cover version of his
work. "Haiku" of course, is an old Japanese minimalist
form of poetry, but hey, every part of the world has blues. This
is the remix!
This piece was part of the Harry Smith Archive - Remixed! Project
curated by Rebecca Shatwell for the alt.gallery, NewCastle Upon
Tyne, UK May 9- June 30, 2007
NEW YORK IS NOW an installation at the
Venice Biennial Africa Pavilion.
Photos from Paul D. Miller installation view of New York is Now, Michaelis School of Fine Art. Exhibition from February 24 to March 10, 2008 Michaelis School of Fine Art University of Cape Town
32 to 37 Orange Street Gardens, Cape Town
Especially created for the Luanda Triennial in 2006, Paul D.
Miller’s “New York is Now (2006)” is a response
to the conditions art reflects in the 21st century’s fast
paced and completely networked global culture. Miller has long
been at home on the global scene of digital culture – as
a writer, artist and musician, his work has focused on the intricate
relationships between what he views as urban culture’s uncanny
relationship to the production processes of digital media. With
“New York is Now” he explores how memory works in
tandem with found archival footage to create a tapestry of a city
made of improvisations, disjunctions, and multiple rhythms. //more
Drawn At Random
A Studio Sound Project by Paul D. Miller for the Denver Art Museum
and Musées de Rouen by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky
The Denver Art Museum and Musées de Rouen commisioned this
project as an audio response to Duchamp's revolution in contemporary
art. I thought it'd be fun to run some of his statements about
art and creativity through the filter of hip hop and dj mashup's
and his concept of the "ready made" ("étant
donées" or "tout fait" in French!). The
result is called "Drawn at Random." I even created a
piano score based loosely around Duchamp's relationship to John
Cage's composition "Music for Marcel Duchamp" that was
written in 1947 for the limited edition CD.
Photos by
C Juliet HighetA Different
Utopia: Project for a New Kalakuta Republic 2003
The "A Different Utopia" project imagines a remix of
the architecture of Fela's "Kalakuta Republic" along
lines imagined by proportion and ratio – it poses two different
cultures in conflict, and like a dj, it asks them to understand
the rhythms of the different cultures that inspired the structures
that Fela engaged. "...Utopia" was conceived as part
of the "Black President" retrospective of Fela Kuti
and his impact on all aspects of contemporary art that was curated
by Trevor Schoonmaker during the summer of 2003 at the New Museum
of Contemporary Art. Some of the other artists in the show included,
amongst others, Yinka Shonibare, Sanford Bigger, Kara Walker,
Klaus Bürgel, and Fred Wilson. "...Utopia" is an
art piece based on Tony Allen's (Fela's drummer and co-producer
on many projects) infamous "No Accomodation for Lagos"
record and the remix I did of his material - in different rhythms
- for the project. Thesis, Anti-thesis – Synthesis. "A
Different Utopia" is a dialectical triangulation between
the forces of modernity and it's fixed forms, and the fluid dynamic
needs of a critique of post-colonial reason and rationality. What
I propose in "A Different Utopia" is a landscape based
on Plato's "Republic", the text is remixed and reconfigured
into a world where everything is not as it seems, and we're left
to our own devices to actually engage the songs of freedom that
Fela made room for in a post, and now, neo, colonial world. The
project opened at the New
Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC July 10, 2003. //more
When I first started dj'ing it was meant to be a hobby. It was
an experiment with rhythm and clues, rhythm and cues: drop the
needle on the record and see what happens when this sound is applied
to this context, or when that sound crashes into that recording...
you get the idea. The first impulses I had about dj culture were
taken from that basic idea - play and irreverence towards the
found objects that we use as consumers and a sense that something
new was right in front of our oh so jaded eyes as we watched the
computer screens at the cusp of the 21st century's beginnings.
I wanted to breathe a little life into the passive relationship
we have with the objects around us, and bring a sense of permanent
uncertainty about the role of art in contemporary urban culture.
Julian Laverdiere is an old friend of mine, and this collaboration
was meant to be a dialog about different forms of sculpture. Basically
the collaboration highlights how physical objects "map"
sound objects onto the kinds of metaphors we use to hold contemporary
information culture together - think of it as hearing the sound
of the world unfold in rhythm. The sound aspect of the piece was
based on the Harrison clocks from the 18th Century that King George
III and British Parliament used to create the "longitude
and latitude" grid system that still guides navigation routes
and configures our perception of "time zones" to this
day. We were given the sounds of the H-4 clock built by John Harrison
in 1764 by the British Admiralty to use in the sculpture/mix.
The physical aspects of the piece were derived from maps given
to us by Miklos Pinther, the United Nations' chief cartographer.
The "Standard Time" project is essentially an exercise
in what I like to call "planetary dynamics" - it explores
how we hold an artificial sense of time and space together with
the socially constructed frames of reference we like to call the
"nation state."
Another
Forensic Charade September 15 - December 9, 2001
The ocean has many faces - it's been an inspiration to humanity
for aeons. With "Another Forensic Charade", I wanted
to add my own views of the currents of commerce and culture flowing
through a port and the museum at its edge. "Another Forensic
Charade" was a commissioned video work made by Magasin
3 in Stockholm, Sweden for a show entitled "Free Port."
Essentially, Richard Julin, the curator for the museum, was curious
about the linkages between architecture, history, and how film
can be seen a kind of hyper-textual archaeology. The harbor where
the museum is located was Stockholm's and all of Sweden's "free
trade zone" for almost 60 years - and when it was opened,
there were cameras to document the process. The artists Julin
invited to present work in the show - myself, Cosima von Bonin,
John Bock, and Janine Antoni, all engaged the idea of ports as
portals, as entryways not only into physical landscapes, but into
the historical relations that configure how land-use and water
use occurs in a world of networks and hyper-active trade routes. //more
The events of 9/11/01 created a panoply of images of mass destruction
and made New York City, already one of the most documented and
recorded cities in human history, become a global symbol of the
American project. In Jean Baudrillard's essay "The Spirit
of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers" (Verso 2002),
this sentiment is echoed and amplified by a kind of fugue state
- Baudrillard regarded the terror strikes as part of a much larger
system of uncanny networks and correspondences between the "image"
of terror and the "reality" of state mystification of
the underlying conditions of America's cultural hegemony of the
contemporary industrialized and non-industrialized world. In essence,
9/11 highlighted how the rest of the world regards America an
an almost mythic mirror of human aspiration, and of New York in
particular as the embodiment of that world condition.
In Saturation Station I worked with a multi-media
artist collective "One Infinity" (now currently working
under the title 47)
to understand the kind of trance that the media portrayal of 9/11
created. "Saturation Station" posits that the media
has participated in the war against terror as a kind of fundamental
flaw in the liberal ideal, the achilles heel of the modern liberal
democracy. We took images from all over the internet and made
a mix from them into a kind of stream of consciousness collage. //more
DJ Spooky has participated in two new book projects.
DJ Spooky also has participated in renowned photographer Lyle Owerko's new book "The Boombox Project" on the history of boomboxes. 
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:
