Interview: DJ Spooky, aka That Subliminal Kid, on Environmentalism, Music, and Multi-media Performance

Image via djspooky.com

DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid, who also goes by Paul D. Miller, is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer. His written work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, and Rapgun among other publications. Miller’s work as a media artist has appeared in the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture (2000); the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and many other museums and galleries. His first collection of essays, entitled Rhythm Science, came out from MIT Press 2004. His book Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on electronic music and digital media, was released in 2008 by MIT Press.

Miller’s most recent large scale multimedia performance work 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. His field recordings from a portable studio, set up to capture the acoustic qualities of Antarctic ice forms, reflect a changing and even vanishing environment under duress. Coupled with historic, scientific, and geographical visual material, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica is a seventy minute performance, creating a unique and powerful moment around man’s relationship with nature.

I recently had a chance to discuss Sinfonia Antarctica and its influences with Miller. He will perform the work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Dec. 2, 4, and 5.

Nick Obourn: What were your reasons for choosing Antarctica as the focus of Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica? Had you been to Antarctica before you went in December 2007 and January 2008? What about this geographical location attracted your interest?

DJ Spooky: Antarctica is the only place on Earth with no government, and no specific relationship to any country. I’ve been fascinated with it since I was a kid and read articles about it in National Geographic, or in short stories by HP Lovecraft, or science fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson. It just seemed like the ultimate place on this planet. The Himalayas are cool. Mt. Victoria is cool. The Andes Mountains are cool. But Antarctica tops them all.

NO: Terra Nova was created from your recordings of moving and shifting bodies of ice in different locations across Antarctica. Beyond what the audio recordings picked up, what were your impressions of what you saw and heard, what you experienced there?

DJS: A lot of my work looks at archival material – records are just documents, so I wanted to think about they way we look at the world around us, and think about issues ranging from noise pollution (NY is one of the loudest cities in the world), to look at historic records that other artists like Vangelis (who did the score to “Blade Runner” one of my favorite movies), who have an album called “Antarctica” have done with the topic. The first symphony about Antarctica was done in 1948, and I guess you could say considering it’s 2009 it’s time to update the formula. I took a studio to Antarctica to get impressions and to think about metaphors–ice core drilling, where they take thin slivers of ice to determine what was in the atmosphere millions of years ago, are also an inspiration. The basic idea is to create a tension between “metaphors” and actual documents–my project even ends with rare footage of a failed Soviet exploration team in the middle of Antarctica. I like stuff like that…

NO: Part of the intention of Terra Nova is to raise awareness of how rapidly the environment of Antarctica is changing and in some cases disappearing. What opportunities does the new media age and art present for environmentalism?

DJS: Everything you do, in every way, it connected to so many of the issues that drive our modern economy. The computer I’m typing on was made in over 25 countries, the clothes I’m wearing were fabricated and made in a process that parallels the same scenario. That’s all “sampling” in a different context. I guess you could say my Antarctic symphony is about climate change literacy. I know that’s a boring term, and if I want to reach the masses, I should probably have some girls in bikinis dancing on icebergs, but hey… I wanted to try something different.

NO: How do you view these opportunities against the backdrop of the Land Art works of the late sixties and seventies like those by Walter de Maria and Robert Smithson? Has the message changed or been redefined since these artists pioneered Land Art?

DJS: The Land Art movement is an inspiration for my work, and so is some of the work by artists like Isaac Julien (who has been doing a lot of work about the Afro-Diaspora in radically different contexts like the Arctic or Morocco). Where Robert Smithson would make “Spiral Jetty,” I would want to think about the same project in sound. “Spiral Sound?” But the other influences for the piece come from stories of the Inuit Indians, and the early Greeks, who came up with the term “Ant-Arktos”–they never went to Antarctica, they just thought that the constellation of the “Bear” (Arktos), had to have a balancing place at the other end of the world. Pretty amazing, myths, eh?

NO: Your previous multimedia performance piece, “Rebirth of a Nation,” is based on a reworking of the D.W. Griffith film, Birth of a Nation. Terra Nova, the second major multimedia performance of your career, is based in name at least on the work of composer Ralph Vaughn Williams and his score for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic. About film, you have said that you enjoy the idea of exploring the form as a found object. Can you speak about this idea of film as a found object?

DJS: I’m a huge fan of early Soviet cinema–theories like Sergei Eisenstein’s “dialectical montage” or Dziga Vertov’s concept of “the cinema eye.” When I was shooting my film footage for this project, I wanted to figure out a way to think about visual rhythm, and the way soundtracks can be edited to highlight the visual process. Some of my favorite “wordless” films are “Powers of 10″ by Ray and Charles Eames, or Godfrey Reggio’s “Koyaanisqatsi.” Found sound is the what I deal with, and found footage is what makes so many dj projects really interesting. It’s about visual democracy, taking the sounds and images around to to the edge of what is possible. Even appropriating the old title of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ soundtrack is a pun. The piece is about metaphors, and layers, just like the ice, but I guess to connect the dots on my work, it takes a little digging into media history. It’s a puzzle, but it’s a fun puzzle.

NO: Do you believe that art can effectively communicate the urgency of our environmental situation? What other ways can this message be communicated to people?

DJS: I’m a big fan of Jared Diamond, and his book “Collapse” or Bill Mckibben’s books, and his 350.org project. On October 24, 5200 events in 181 countries came together for the most widespread day of environmental a people at over action in the planet’s history. Stuff like that or Earth Day – where I dj’d in front of over 100,000 people, are amazing situations. They inherit some of the best activities of the 60s culture, but they also are catalysts. We need a lot more of that kind of thing. AVAAZ has also been doing a great job of raising awareness, and I’ve worked with them as well.

NO: In a video introduction to The Secret Song, your new album, you state that sampling and appropriation are like collage, and they are an art practice based on taking text out of context and playing with the juxtapositions of radically different materials. In Terra Nova, you have taken the sounds of Antarctica and put them into a different context, repurposing them into music and video art for an audience. Since every culture is removed from uninhabited Antarctica, do you think the continent is too out of context? Or is there a universal message to be found in the changing landscape of Antarctica?

DJS: I guess if you look at history, the term “collage” is based on the idea of gluing things together–it could be welding, it could be taking a web page and doing the same thing. The painters George Braque and Picasso are supposedly the people who coined the term, but you never know. Antarctica is a blank space, so we all project our ideas about it in one way or another. So many countries have tried to claim the idea, that the IDEA of Antarctica is a collage of imperialism, colonialism, Utopianism, etc. I like to think of it as a kaleidoscopic situation. And that’s what my piece is about. I spent four weeks there trying to figure this out, and it’s really a first step. I plan on going back over the next several years to different regions. Werner Herzog was shooting his film “Encounters at The End of The World” when I was there, so there’s an uncanny dynamic at work. I love seeing how two radically different people like me and him could land on the same topic. Ice is my palette for this project – think about how many black people call themselves “Ice Cube, Ice-T, Soul on Ice, Iceberg Slim etc” or bling bling is about “ice”. The social metaphors are bizarre, and that’s what happens when you have an undefined space–it’s a metaphor. My symphony is about making that metaphor become a passion.

NO: In your opinion, why do you think there seems to be the lack of a collective intelligence or an acceptance about the state of our planet? With what we know now about global warming, with what scientists have told us, and with the imminent dangers for our ecosystem and our safety, why haven’t there been more drastic movements to reshape the way we live and act? What, in your view, is preventing progress?

DJS: If you tell an addict that doing the drug that makes them an addict is bad for them, they look at almost any possible answer to avoid the changes of behavior it would take to get rid of the addiction. Our civilization is doing the same thing. It’s kind of like trying to change the course of the Titanic with about 3 feet of wiggle room. You might deflect the course of the ship just enough to avoid sinking, but you’re still going to take a massive hit. The propaganda war about climate change appalls me because the right wing types that are in denial are exactly like the addicts or zombies in a bad B-movie. It depresses me that so many people still believe them.

NO: From Picasso’s painting Guernica to the work of a contemporaries like Ai Weiwei, to give two examples, artists often attempt to articulate a poignant message that addresses the injustices or tragedies of a society. Aside from the environment, which you address in Terra Nova, what are the major issues today that you feel need articulating, especially by artists?

DJS: One of my favorite Antarctic art projects is simple – The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 has nothing to do with art, but it set the tone for scientific cooperation, and the political will to try and preserve this stunning place. Ditto for the Maldives government that started meeting underwater as a protest against the rising waters that will consume their island. I like stuff like that.

NO: Lastly, what do you hope people take away from your shows at BAM and the other venues where you will perform Terra Nova? How do you hope to inform people?

DJS: I guess you could say that I hope they take away a simple thought: that another world is possible. It doesn’t need to be this way.