 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. // Read the NYT Article // BUY THE BOOK |
Copyright Criminals - a Documentary by Ben Frantzen and Kembrew McleodI'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.! |
ORDER NOW!!! DJ Spooky’s REBIRTH OF A NATION DVD
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OUT NOW! DJ Spooky's "Sound Unbound"// MIT PRESS WEBSITE
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CREATION REBEL MIX CD on Trojan Records// AMAZON // iTunes
DJ Spooky has produced material on the new Yoko Ono album.// BUY AT AMAZON
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RHYTHM SCIENCE:Book with CD on MIT Press //website
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Ice, Ice, BabyBy Paul D. Miller “Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.” ~ Ambrose Bierce The future isn’t what it used to be. As I sit here and write in NY, it’s the 20th anniversary of Photoshop, and we stand poised to see an IMAX version of the Hubble telecsope’s photographs of the cosmos narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s 2010, and the hall of mirrors that we call modern finance is in full fledged meltdown, and of course, as always, it’s just a kind of quotidian scenario for the cell phone, mobile camera “enhanced reality” info-economy that we call home. What I want to write about is the basic sense of realism that travel photography brings to our collective psyche in the world of hyper-realism and hyper fractured relativity. Capitalism implies and induces insecurity on a vast scale, and that kind of market insecurity, which is constantly being exploited, of course, by all sorts of people and nations. Cameras capture that, and allow us to hold it in our hands like a drop of amber from a remote, Paleolithic era. That’s the basic reality of hyper-post-everything 21st century realism. From Edward Burtynsky's "Manufactured Landscapes" on over Bernie Madoff to the infamous statement of one of G.W. Bush’s chief aides who said that we are no longer in what he liked to call the “reality based community,” this kind of “unheimlich” (as Sigmund Freud liked to call the “uncanny”), over shadows almost anything that scientific imagery can come up with. You simply can never be sure… The statement comes home to roost: reality, and realism, like a plot of a story we all know, like scaffolding being torn down around a familiar building, we thought we knew, and that suddenly vanishes into thin, very thin air. Which brings me to my topic: photography in Antarctica. This is Aperture magazine, so I’m going to write about cool photographs from Antarctica – but, elliptically. In the Austral summer of 2008 I went to Antarctica, and took a studio along with me to document the process of what it would be like to create music symphony out of acoustic portraits of ice. I know that’s not exactly the theme of material that Aperture normally covers, but hey… I like to create strange and unexpected juxtapositions. Consider this: in June, 1910, a ship called the Terra Nova, set sail from England with one goal in mind – to reach the South Pole. One of the 33 crew members under Captain Robert Scott's command was Herbert Ponting, the first "camera artist" to be taken to Antarctica. Think of this scenario as the same realism as Neil Armstrong’s moon landings, and you can begin to imagine how complex the voyage was, and how deeply moving the images of ice that Ponting, and later, Frank Hurley, bought back to the “civilized” world on the edge of World War I. Realism, indeed. Where some would say that the idea of creating scenes from “actualities” Georges Méliès, was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He accidentally discovered the stop trick, or substitution, in 1896, and was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color in his films. Because of his ability to seemingly manipulate and transform reality through cinematography, Méliès is sometimes referred to as the "Cinemagician.” I like to think of the realism of the Lumière brothers as the counter-point to the same material that Méliès experimented with. Without the two - exploration photography wouldn't have the same gravitas. Impossible voyages, that's what travel photography likes to capture, and in a way, that's one of the inspirations for the symphony I wrote in Antarctica - moving into historical photographs from 1910 as a guidepost for my own journey in 2008. Along with Orson Welles, who was also a magician, I’ve always been drawn to how people can take our beliefs in the “ureal” and create radically reconstructed versions of a kind of “hyper-reality” – stuff like Orson Welles’ infamous “War of the Worlds” with the Mercury Theater on the Air, on October 30, 1938, or Stalin’s penchant for erasing his opponents fro m photographs etc. All of that comes to mind with what I like to think of the kind of “natural” photographs that Ponting and Hurley bequeath to us. I still have an eerie feeling when I see them. I’m haunted by Méliès and Welles – of magicians become film-makers and photographers, and back again. The realism of which, is always, always, always, part of the debate we need to explore as the 21st century unfolds. |
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