New York is Now (2006)

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.

Inspired by Ornette Coleman’s classic free jazz album of 1968, Miller has gone through thousands of film portraits of the city that has inspired his work. New York has long been considered a global starting point for many of the most important artists of the last century, and Miller starts with the poem “Mannahatta” by Walt Whitman and rapidly moves through a series of architectural invocations that leave the viewer with a sense that the “city” for Miller, like Coleman, is a structure made of many rhythms, some local, some global, - all syncopated to a collage based aesthetic.

For the Luanda Triennial, Miller creates a collage tapestry of New York through the prism of jazz, and found footage appropriated from material as diverse as Duke Ellington’s “Harlem Tone Poem,” Hans Arp’s “Rhythmus 21,”,Situationist architect Constant’s “Manifesto for a New Babylon,” Marcel Duchamp’s “Anemic Cinema,” Meilies “l’homme orchestre,” Thomas Edison’s portraits of the electrification of Coney Island, George Antheil’s “Ballet Mechanique”and many other bits and pieces from the 20th century.

In essence, “New York is Now” is a video portrait of a New York at the edge of the recorded imagination – a city made of many rhythms and tempos. Miller’s composition looks at history, cinema, and how the we think about urbanism in the 21st century. The science fiction writer William Gibson once wrote “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” Miller reveals to us how much this phrase has come to mean in the realm of digital media as an artform that reveals many of the hidden connections between the way we live in the 21st century’s media dense, global information economy. “New York is Now” posits a place where all these visions of the urban landscape exist simultaneously.

The U.S. participation in the First Luanda Trienal is presented by the American Embassy, Luanda, and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C.; with the guidance and assistance of Laurie Ann Farrell, Museum for African Art, New York.

{ The image below is a still from the film }