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 Энтузиазм: Симфония Донбасса
(Enthusiasm: Sinfonia Donbassa)
// READ MORE
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
// VIEW MORE
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 choreapgraphy. |
  The Nauru Elegies: A Portrait in Sound and Hypsographic Architecture
Paul D. Miller and Annie Kwon
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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: A Portrait in Sound and Hypsographic Architecture is a technical synthesis of a live string ensemble, projected high-definition video footage, 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 in Yokohama by local musicians. It is a statement of technology and media processes in the 21st century that is exponentially progressing to a more dematerialized and delocalized state.
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 TERRA NOVA: Sinfonia Antarctica
// VIEW + MORE
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.
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    Rebirth
of a Nation
// PURCHASE DVD
// Read the essay and view and excerpt of the remix
// Prints from the Path is Prologue show at the Paula Cooper
Gallery
// A Conversation
with critic Roselee Goldberg in French
(Entretien avec
Roselee Goldberg)
Listen to excerpts of the music
//EXCERPT
1 (mp3, 3.5MB)
//EXCERPT
2 (mp3, 4MB)
//EXCERPT
3 (mp3, 3.25MB)
//Download the Rebirth of a Nation
musical score composed by DJ Spooky
(zipped pdf archive, 3MB)
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. |
  System
Error: Al-Yamamah Mix
(Podcast Aesthetics)
// Read the Essay
// Listen to the
Podcast
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.
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  Harry Smith Archive - Remixed! Project
// Read
the essay [english]
// View the invite [jpg]
// View the artwork [jpg]
// www.altgallery.org
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
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  New York is Now
// Read
the essay [english]
// Read
the essay [portuguese]
// www.trienal-de-luanda.net
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
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 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
// Read
the Essay
// Download
the Score (pdf)
// www.denverartmuseum.org
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.
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Photos by
C Juliet HighetA Different
Utopia:
Project for a New Kalakuta Republic 2003
// View
the project 3MB
// Read
the essay
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 |
 Errata Erratum
//View
the project
//Read
the notes
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.
Audio Remixes
//Ambient
//Dub
//Feedback
Screensavers
//Mac
OSX
//Mac
OS9
Posters
//Final
//Monochrome |
   "Standard Time" Project
// Read the Essay and View the Project
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
// Another
Forensic Charade
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 |
   Saturation
Station
// View an Excerpt and Read the Essay
// Download
the PC version 5.4MB
// Download the Mac OS
9 version 4.5MB
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
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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
